# Which USB or PCMCIA NIC



## balanga (Jun 3, 2016)

Can anyone recommend either a PCMCIA or USB Gigabit NIC?

I'm trying to turn a laptop into a router and need a second NIC.

Apparently a single NIC will suffice if used with a VLAN but I can't get my head round configuring a VLAN.


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## balanga (Jun 13, 2016)

How would I go about finding out if anyone is working on developing FreeBSD 1Gb drivers for the hardware which is currently available?


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## tingo (Jun 13, 2016)

FWIW, I have only ever seen 10 / 100 Mbps PCMCIA NICs. I don't think the PCMCIA bus is fast enough. And for usb, I think you are going to need USB3 if you want 1 Gbps performance (throughput) as opposed to 1 Gbps link speed...


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## balanga (Jun 13, 2016)

tingo said:


> FWIW, I have only ever seen 10 / 100 Mbps PCMCIA NICs. I don't think the PCMCIA bus is fast enough. And for usb, I think you are going to need USB3 if you want 1 Gbps performance (throughput) as opposed to 1 Gbps link speed...


Actually, I recently bought a PCMCIA adapter which is labelled as ST Lab Gigabit Ethernet (32-BIT) Cardbus Adapter. Unfortunately it doesn't work with FreeBSD even though FreeBSD does recognise it.

Interestingly I have just connected a 1Gb USB adapter to my laptop - a ThinkPad X61 - (it didn't work previously with other laptops) and it started  working, so I guess my search is over.

How would I go about measuring performance?


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## Phishfry (Jun 13, 2016)

Run this on both ends. There is a Windows version too.
benchmarks/iperf3

http://software.es.net/iperf/invoking.html

You run server mode on one computer
`iperf -s`

And client on another
`iperf -c`
As I said they have clients for many OS's so you can benchmark cross-OS.
Good guide here:
http://openmaniak.com/iperf.php


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## SirDice (Jun 14, 2016)

balanga said:


> Interestingly I have just connected a 1Gb USB adapter to my laptop - a ThinkPad X61 - (it didn't work previously with other laptops) and it started working, so I guess my search is over.


Note that the raw data bandwidth of USB 2.0 is only 480Mbps.


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