Another helpful solution – like – one that actually worked… Which is – you know… helpful…

After searching around for answers and encountering several “solutions” to a problem – I figured I’d try to keep track of solutions that actually work as advertised.

In this instance – my new CE edition of pfSense Firewall – built on an old Dell Optiplex 3020 – would not recognize my secondary Realtek NIC – so – no LAN interface. This was confusing – as it did see my onboard 10/100/1000 Realtek NIC immediately. The secondary NIC only showed as “none1@pci” when the command “pciconf -lv” was run in the shell.

After following the instructions on the page below – the system recognized the drivers and the “new” NIC in the system.

“As jimp said in the other thread in 2.5 the FreeBSD package for this is in our repo. So you can simply do this at the command line:

pkg install realtek-re-kmod
then
echo 'if_re_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf.local

Then reboot and check the boot logs for output from the new driver loading…”

After running “pkg install realtek-re-kmod” – you are prompted to add the lines to a new “loader.conf.local” file and on additional line:
“if_re_name”/boot/modules/if_re.ko”

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/135850/official-realtek-driver-binary-1-95-for-2-4-4-release/171?_=1735518157649

So far – the system is operational in production. The only “bug” I ran into was a kernel panic crash after running traceroute from both the GUI and the console. Both Realtek NICS crash the system and force a reboot whenever traceroute is run… So – there’s that to contend with.

So – if you find yourself in hot water with Realtek NICs and pfSense – this was a working solution for me.

The only other quirk is the lack of a link-state light on the NIC – but that is way out of my pay grade.