iKOOLCORE R2 and its Realtek RTL8156BG-based 2.5G NIC

[ZHS]

Hi everyone,

I have a iKOOLCORE R2 that I want to use as a homeserver that hosts various network and other applications.

Since it has 4 NICs (3 x Intel i226-v 2.5G network cards (via PCIe) and 1 x Realtek RTL8156BG-based 2.5G network card (via USB 3.0)). I wanted to use 2 of the Intel NICs for OPNsense. 3rd Intel NIC was supposed to be for various other applications (Pi-hole, Tailscale, etc.) and I wanted to use the 4th NIC (the Realtek one) as Proxmox managment port.

However, Realtek NIC behaves in such a way that it periodically crashes and the Promox WebUI is unavailable until I reboot the whole system.

I installed both Proxmox 8.1.4 and 8.2.2 and the behaviour on both systems is the same - it works for a couple of hours and then becomes unreachable.

I tried various tips I could find for how to get this Realtek NIC to work, but I always get some sort of error when I install the package I found in the tips.

Has anybody been able to get this NIC to work reliably on Proxmox 8.x?

 

[nosoop4u]

Don't overthink it. You don't need a dedicated management port on a home server. I run most of my services on a box with a single 1Gb NIC, and I've got almost 50 unique devices on my home network.

 

[ZHS]

Thank you for your message, but I would really like to use this NIC at least in some other capacity. Is there any way to get it to behave without it dropping randomly?

 

[Crash_Course]

Have you tried passthrough to a vm and let the vm handle the drivers? New to proxmox but just a thought

 

[ZHS]

I have not, I have been searching for a way to get it to work in the original way. However, I intend to try it with a VM (my guess is that LXC would not solve this problem).

 

[Docop2]

There is no problem there, all is normal. The usb nic are just a fun tool for laptop and so. the disconnect and system freeze is normal with that. If you do build a server, go with intel nic card and all will be problem free.
and just put a prox ip over one the the other port and you can acess prox via multiple ip.