Sunday 12 May 2013

ASIX AX88178 USB2.0 to 10/100/1000 ethernet adapter

For some time I have had a USB 2.0 to Gigabit network adapter that I purchased of eBay in my "surplus" equipment collection. It was purchased for a time where I was using a laptop as a home server, but as I no longer have a requirement for a home server it has been sitting on the shelf.

Just recently I have had a requirement where I am testing software firewall distributions on another laptop, an Asus 1000H, and have had luck with it working on pfSense (2.0.3) and IPFire (2.13 core 67-70)

As the device is "generic" I decided to investigate a little further to what capabilities it has and discovered it has a ASIX AX88178 chipset.

While I am very happy with the performance of this device, if I was to purchase another USB NIC I would choose a AX88178a or AX88179 chipset based device as they are newer and support VLAN tagging, which would be nice to implement in the future.


Here are a few images of my device.