Gary 

Popped a cheap M.2 2.5GbE Relatek NIC in my little #proxmox server today with the hope that it’ll do for running #opnsense.

Sadly it doesn’t seem to work. Cant even see it with lspci. More investigation obviously required, but not today…

Oct 11 at 12:00pmWeb
Show threadGary Oct 11

I put the M.2 WiFi adapter back in that the machine shipped with, and Linux can’t see that either.

I’m now wondering if, as I never used it in the past, I’ve disabled it in the BIOS (and forgotten about it), and that’s also affecting the new NIC? 🤔

I’ll need to find a monitor and keyboard for this machine, and see what the BIOS says…

Show threadGary Oct 11

It’s supposed to have Bluetooth, too, which also isn’t showing. I suspect I disabled all this when I was running ESXi on it in the past…

*edit* ah, no, my mistake: Bluetooth is hung off USB, not PCI, so shows up with lsusb 🙄

But then that’s really odd, as the Lenovo spec sheet suggests these devices have an integrated WiFi+bluetooth combo device 🤔

Show threadGary Oct 11

So this video shows someone doing the same as me with almost identical hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMKvhx7z3aY

Interestingly, someone in the comments seems to be having the same problem, and notes that they'd previously turned wifi off in the BIOS. Encouraging!

I'll have to get at the BIOS when I get chance...

Dual NIC on a Lenovo Tiny Thinkcentre? Proxmox bond set-up - Project Tiny Homelab EP4

YouTube
Show threadGary Oct 13

Update: I got the box hooked up to VGA and got video output, so it looks like my DisplayPort to HDMI dongle is broken 😞

The WiFi adapter was disabled in the BIOS, as I suspected, so I turned it on, rebooted, and could see it in lspci 👍

I shut the box down, swapped out the wifi adapter for the Realtek NIC, booted up and proxmox saw it straight away, no need to load any drivers 🥳

Show threadMartin HamiltonOct 11
@WiteWulf Ooh! I was just thinking about getting into ThinkCentre type tiny PCs for a bit of self-hosting fun and games. Leaving current tribulations aside, how's it been?
Show threadGary Oct 11
@m oh, they’re very good! You can pick ex-corpo ones up dirt cheap on fleabay with decent CPU in. Then fill them with RAM and and NVMe and you’ve got a nice little proxmox host. Very small, quiet and low power draw. The higher spec CPU ones cost a bit more, but not loads.
Show threadMartin HamiltonOct 11
@WiteWulf Great! Time to read up on specs... https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution

STH Project TinyMiniMicro is set to revolutionize the home lab segment with clusters of high-quality, quiet, low power, and inexpensive nodes

ServeTheHome
Show threadGary Oct 11
@m yeah, they’ve been very popular with home VMware labs for years. Cheap and small way to run a cluster.
Show threadviharmOct 11

@WiteWulf

Although #OPNsense is better than #pfSense at accepting #realtek NICs, it still is based on #BSD, right?

I moved to #OpenWrt (based on #linux), and probably never going back, purely because #Linux doesn't complain about these NICs. It also has excellent support for advanced functionalities like #VLANs & and truckload of plugins.

I’d still prefer #Intel NICs, but I'm loving OpenWrt on my x86 system.

Show threadGary Oct 11

@viharm yeah, I’m currently running openwrt on an old wrt32x router and it’s absolutely solid. But the hardware’s not up to the task of routing 1Gb/s PPPoE, which I’ll have soon, and opnsense is supposed to be much better for this.

Anyways, I don’t think my problems are at the software/OS level if lspci can’t even see the card. I suspect it’s a hardware issue. Probably the cheap tat NIC I bought off AliExpress 🤷‍♂️

Show threadGavinOct 11
@WiteWulf remember that OPNsense is currently FreeBSD 14.3 based - Realtek _anything_ can be a little spotty, a 2.5GbE M.2 adapter might just be too new
Show threadGary Oct 11
@_calmdowndear yeah, so the reason behind this is to have a system capable of GbE throughout PPPoE. The best option for that seems to be running OPNsense as a Proxmox guest *without* passing through the physical NIC. Create a proxmox bridge interface with the NIC, then give OPNsense a vmnic (which it has good driver support for). Something about this combo seems to give much better PPPoE throughout from what I’ve read.