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Hey !

So while packing to come back home for the Holiday Season, I forgot my Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter worth ~US$40 at my university lodging unintentionally. Not in a spirit to spend money on same kind of adapter, I bought a comparatively cheaper Quantum QHM8106 USB LAN Card worth~US$4.50 to make my MacBook Pro work with the high speed ethernet at least for the time being.

Because of pretty much obvious reasons, it wasn’t guaranteed to be compatible macOS Sierra owing to Apple’s latest update with security. It was also disappointing that the product didn’t come with any CD or link to have the necessary drivers. On reaching home, I first tried it with Hewlett Packard Envy 17, my home laptop loaded with Windows 10. Initially, it didn’t recognise but after a few restarts and disable/enable, the tiny red and green LEDs did light up along with a ‘internet access’ notification, making sure that the cheap adapter was in well working condition.

Next, connecting it to my MacBook Pro it showed no signs of even lighting that tiny red LED indicator on the adapter. The routine restarts and disable/enable didn’t help either, I wasn’t amazed 😅

Doing the basic search, I found a thread on discussions.apple.com titled “Quantum Usb to lan adapter not working in El Capitan, it worked fine with Yosemite.” which gave little information except for a link to a blog. Reading through it and also taking the risk of disabling Mac’s SIP (System Integrity Protection) to install not-much-verified driver didn’t help instead made the system boot up very slow. I had to undo the entire process to bring things back to normal.

After changing a few settings locally leading to nowhere, I was back to googling. Now, I tried finding a driver to install to make it work. Reading about different drivers compatible with macOS but not Sierra in particular, I wasn’t really sure about helpful installation and working.

Like an oasis in a vast dry desert, I came across the hint of AX88772 — USB2.0 to 10/100M Fast Ethernet Controller with Embedded PHY being utilised in QHM8106. Going through the quality reading material provided by the Axis Electronics Corporation, I was well satisfied and downloaded the Apple Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.12 Driver (V2.5.0). Finally, the installation of the AX88772 Driver for Mac from the Axis Electronics Corporation and a restart was all macOS Sierra and QHM8106 USB LAN Card needed to kick-off working in sync serving their holy purpose.

Phew, that was quite an hour or two spent !

Thanks Google, random blogspots, discussion threads and Axis Electronics Corporation.

Hope this helps all who are in the same situation 🙂

Happy Hacking !