20200219 - Tuesday

From now on I'm going to refer to the NICs by their most obvious identifier for two reasons:

1. It's shorter
2. I'm probably returning the original, but would like to easily be able to refer to either.

I'll refer to the original as PT.

I'll refer to the ideal model as i350.

Snag 2: I mistook regular PCI slots for PCIe. Fortunately this isn't a huge issue. There are two PCIe slots - I'm assuming both are 1.0 or 1.1:

1. PCIe x16
2. PCIe x1

In either case they shouldn't be a bottleneck for Gigabit, though I sure wish they were 2.0+.

Plenty of bandwidth, I think? But things are still a bit unclear to me. Both are x4 (lane) cards, but there's a 20% loss associated with the above transfer rate, and I don't know if all four lanes are associated with that transfer rate to begin with. Assuming the card is only transferring relevant information and the loss is included, we get:

So, you can see why I'm not too worried. It should be noted that while PCIe buses are capable of full duplex communication, each lane is unidirectional between its endpoints. Similarly full duplex Gigabit ethernet is 1Gb/s in each direction, each conductor being unidirectional.

The x1 slot was open - but the x16 slot had a video card installed. Luckily there's another onboard VGA video card, so I removed the x16 card and installed the PT.

Boot goes fine - the card is recognized and pfSense let me configure it -- but then the system goes into this weird loop. I'm thinking it's a config file issue, but here is what I'm thinking for workflow:

1. I still need to go through the list I defined in a previous log - but a few more pressing things have come up
2. Update config and test
3. pfSense's boot loader is still being wonky - preferring the DVD drive as the highest priority. I want to eliminate this as a sticking point because it adds minutes to the boot sequence.
4. If all above goes well, then I can see how stable the USB Flash install is.
5. Return to previous log workflow.

N.B. This has got me thinking -- I do have another old , larger tower with a more substantial motherboard. Now that I have re-familiarized myself with hardware of this era, I should inspect that board to see if it wouldn't be a better fit. I might be able to use either/both machines.

Anyhow - moving on.