Trying to get NIC configured on FreeBSD

[technossomy]

I have just installed DesktopBSD v1.6 and it is working fine except that the ethernet card is not detected. I have used all standard settings during the installation procedure. It works under Fedora and PuppyLinux. The output of ifconfig is:

plip0: flags=108851<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,NEEDSGIANT> mtu 1500
inet 0.0.0.0 --> 255.255.255.255 netmask 0xff000000
lo0:
flags=8094<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
inet6 fe80::1&#37;lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet 127.0.0.1 netnmask 0xff000000

Would appreciate any help.

Edit: I am looking to use DHCP as well

[nalg0rath]

This might mean that you are out of luck, FreeBSD might not support your NIC. There might be drivers that are not in the base install. Could you post the model of NIC you are using?

Also it might be useful if you could post relevant lines from 'dmesg' output.

[technossomy]

Thanks for your response. Here is the output of dmesg under Puppy:

# dmesg | grep eth
eth0: ULi M5263 at pci0000:00:1b.0, 00:17:31:1a:76:d0, irq 10.
uli526x: eth0 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full duplex

So that means a driver for this card needs to be installed? And if so, could you briefly describe how I install a driver for a machine without network access or floppy drive?

Many thanks in advance

Tech

[nalg0rath]

I'm sorry for the late response. As far as I can tell your NIC is not supported by FreeBSD and therefore they don't provide drivers for it (yet). They might include drivers in later versions of FreeBSD.

You could try to search around the internet for some inofficial binary driver. This is not very common in the BSD-world so you'll probably not find anything.

You will probably have to buy a new NIC if you need to run FreeBSD. If you do, make sure it is in the list on FreeBSD i386 Supported hardware. (If you use a dirrerent architecture than i386 you should make sure that the device is supported on your arch).

[technossomy]

Thanks for your response nonetheless. I believe this particular machine was at some stage upgraded with a network card, but I can't recall for what reason. Need to check whether the onboard NIC or the new network card is used. At least worth a try.

[technossomy]

No such luck indeed. It uses the on-board NIC. Will see what happens if a network card is plugged in.

[anomie]

Are you saying there are two NICs in the box?

If so, run sysinstall and go to Configure -> Networking -> Interfaces. You should be able to configure both NICs from there (they are named based on chipset).

Perhaps the second NIC will be supported.

[technossomy]

There are now two NICs in the machine indeed. The plugged in 3Com worked. Now on to installing software. Thanks for your help.