DrayTek VigorNIC 132 VDSL PCI-E Card

Posted on by

My DrayTek VigorNIC 132 card has been in use for over 10 days and so far so good.

The firmware was updated to the latest version and configured in bridge mode for use with my Pfsense Node 202 box. The only bug encountered was documented in the release notes by DrayTek, when choosing Bridged mode a box had to be unticked first otherwise it would display an error message about not leaving an IP address field blank. And for some reason the UK firmware didn’t work, upon flashing the card entered recovery mode, TFTP back to factory then used the same firmware from DrayTek’s German website.

Line stats look good too but have dropped since adjusting Pfsense settings, what i’m not sure on is if every time you change firewall / NAT settings does it disconnect the WAN momentarily?. I did a lot of adjustments to the firewall rules as I was messing around with settings / port forwarding options. If this didn’t cause the DLM adjustment then it can only be the fact that I disconnected the WAN a few times when I first tried the card. The DLM adjusted the line to 54mbps / 18mbps with interleaved mode enabled (this lasted 2 days, currently at 60mpbs / 20mbps fastpath mode). Prior to changing my BT HomeHub 6.0 (SmartHub) was running 65mbps / 18mbps sync speeds.

The DrayTek VigorNIC 132 card is being used with the following hardware

  • Intel Celeron G3900 2.8Ghz Dual core CPU
  • Asus Z170i Pro Gaming M-ITX board
  • Adata 32GB DDR4 RAM
  • SKHynix 250GB SSD
  • Corsair SF600 PSU
  • Pfsense firewall / router software

The WAN is being routed to the motherboard’s network card as when you run in Bridge mode the DrayTek internal NAT / router software is disabled, which is better as this means Pfsense (motherboard / CPU) is doing the work and it makes use of the Intel 219V on the ASUS board. Overall faster internet browsing compared to the openreach modem I trialed earlier with Pfsense on a J1800N SoC Celeron board.

I will have to wait a few weeks to see if the line speed recovers with this setup, if the line stats are true, I would imagine some improvement but more on that later.