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.

 

[Cold-Lemonade]

@ZHS I have the iKoolCore R2 and have been experiencing the same problem. I use the Realtek RJ45 port as the management interface for my Proxmox 8.3.1 instance (with kernel 6.8.12-4) and after 36 hours of uptime (and usually much less), it suddenly disconnects from the system and it requires a system reboot to bring back.

Because this interface is via USB, I suspect what is happening is that the iKoolCore R2 puts the USB interface into low power mode when there has been no activity on it for a long period of time. This seems to disconnect the interface and, when Proxmox brings it back up, it doesn't seem to get restored properly.

The solution I have found is to edit the /etc/default/grub file and change the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line to include: usbcore.autosuspend=-1 usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k

My revised line now reads: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on iommu=pt usbcore.autosuspend=-1 usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"

Don't forget to issue the update-grub command after saving the file. Then reboot Proxmox for the new settings to take hold.

This solution is mentioned in another thread: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/realtek-usb-2-5-gbe-random-usb-disconnect.138253/#post-712188

I also upgraded the intel microcode in Proxmox before I edited grub. So you might want to do that too if editing grub alone doesn't fix the issue. You can search the forum to find how to do that. It's pretty straightforward.

Separately, the driver that's included in the kernel for this particular Realtek nic is quite old. I am not sure whether that contributes to the problem. Because the fix described above worked for me, I didn't upgrade the driver to the newest version. But that was what I was going to do next if it didn't fix the problem.

I see that your original post is nearly 8 months old. I hope you haven't been suffering through this problem all this time. At any rate, if you try the solution I describe, please post back here to let everyone know whether it worked for you.