Recommendations about a 100/10 NIC

What ethernet cards I should use for Linux 2.4?. I am looking for a NIC based on stability and performance. In short, Intel PRO/100 S Desktop Adapter(e100 driver) or 3Com 10/100 3C905C-TX-M(3c59x driver) ?

thank you,

I'd reccomend a 3COM, as they come with a lifetime warranty and have always been good for me.
Not sure about Intels.
I have a 3com 905b, the current model is a 3com 905C-TX like you mentioned.

Does lifetime warranty mean you have warranty on them as long as they are alife?

Greetings
Bernd

In my humble experience with some hundreds of different Linux servers, the 3c905 seems the most trouble-free, and performs well.

The Intel adapter has potential driver issues, although they seem to be getting resolved.

The e100 driver has the disadvantage of being unable to work with the mii-tool commands, but seems to work well otherwise - as long as you don't mind trying to puzzle out whether the card is conected at 10 or 100, full or half.

The eepro100 driver works with mii-tool, but many have reported issues with the card dying under heavy use and needing to be reset. Many are using the eepro100 without problems - but the bottom line is that nobody is seeing these problems with the 3com cards.

YMMV of course -

Joe

Any recommendations for the most Linux-friendly/best performance, 2-ethernet port cards? Is there a website one could go to find Linux Compatible and Linux-ease-of-use hardware and software products? Comparisons? Etc?

TIA,
Linda

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of J Sloan
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2002 9:15 AM
To: janvapan
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Recommendations about a 100/10 NIC

In my humble experience with some hundreds
of different Linux servers, the 3c905 seems the
most trouble-free, and performs well.

The Intel adapter has potential driver issues,
although they seem to be getting resolved.

The e100 driver has the disadvantage of being
unable to work with the mii-tool commands,
but seems to work well otherwise - as long as
you don't mind trying to puzzle out whether
the card is conected at 10 or 100, full or half.

The eepro100 driver works with mii-tool, but
many have reported issues with the card dying
under heavy use and needing to be reset. Many
are using the eepro100 without problems - but
the bottom line is that nobody is seeing these
problems with the 3com cards.

YMMV of course -

Joe

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Hmm, the only multiport cards I've used are some tlans and some intel pro 100s -

The tlans are no good for serious use, at least in my experience - I've been replacing them as replacements are available.

The dual intel 10/100s I've used work fine, they are simply detected as 2 intel ethernet devices.

Joe

Linda, I've got a dual port Intel eepro100 card in this machine. I've had it close to a year, with nothing but excellent performance and stability. I can't say the same thing for other cards i've tried in here, namingly the 3com adapters everyone seems to think are so great. I won't even touch a 3com adapter anymore, but i digress... These dual eepro100 cards can be had used for relatively cheap; i think I purchased this one for $45USD when i bought it...

Am Sonntag, 3. März 2002 15:22 schrieb Justin Piszcz:

Which of those cards supports calculating ethernet checksums in hardware?

Thanks in advance,

Johnny

On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Hans-Christian Armingeon wrote:

| Am Sonntag, 3. März 2002 15:22 schrieb Justin Piszcz:
| > I'd reccomend a 3COM, as they come with a lifetime warranty and have always
| > been good for me.
| > Not sure about Intels.
| > I have a 3com 905b, the current model is a 3com 905C-TX like you mentioned.
| Which of those cards supports calculating ethernet checksums in hardware?

All of them do ethernet checksums^W CRCs in hardware.

Did you mean something like, "which ones do IP and/or TCP checksums (offloads) in hardware?"

~Randy

Am Sonntag, 3. März 2002 15:22 schrieb Justin Piszcz:

every major brand nic has lifetime warranty

On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 09:15:05AM -0800, J Sloan wrote:

| In my humble experience with some hundreds
| of different Linux servers, the 3c905 seems the
| most trouble-free, and performs well.

Ah, I bet you didn't live through the truly atrocious 3Com drivers of the past. ;) The new 3Com stuff seems passable for desktops, but having been bitten dozens of times, I'm about 4^4^4^4 times shy.

| The Intel adapter has potential driver issues,
| although they seem to be getting resolved.

Haven't had any issues at all with eepro100 or e100 under production load for years. Since Tulip went out of the mainstream (poor Digital) the EtherExpress has been the most stable everywhere I've been. I've written too many scripts for 3Com boxes that grep dmesg for "fatal" errors and unload/reload the 3com module.

| The e100 driver has the disadvantage of being
| unable to work with the mii-tool commands,

Yes, and the fact that it "can't" be compiled-in.

| but seems to work well otherwise - as long as
| you don't mind trying to puzzle out whether
| the card is conected at 10 or 100, full or half.

That's all logged (dmesg, etc), if not distinctly queryable. Don't the iANS tools allow this functionality, and more?

| The eepro100 driver works with mii-tool, but
| many have reported issues with the card dying
| under heavy use and needing to be reset. Many
| are using the eepro100 without problems - but
| the bottom line is that nobody is seeing these
| problems with the 3com cards.

Uhm, "nobody" is certainly not the proper word in this context. We've pulled many 3Com cards because of issues, including ARP deafness, overruns, hangs, etc. I have fully-saturated IDS systems running eepro100 and e100 without issue, so heavy use may be necessary but is not sufficient.

Oh, and six years of production on hundreds of EtherExpress NICs with zero (0) issues. Obviously, not everyone sees every bug, but the preponderance of evidence I've seen in production environments puts the EE way ahead of 3Com. 3Com for Windows desktops works just fine.

I'd like to try existing Tulip hardware though for another option. Though 8139too seems to work well.

Ken.
[email protected]

| 
| YMMV of course -
| 
| Joe
|  
| 

| janvapan wrote:
| 
| >What ethernet cards I should use for Linux 2.4?.
| >I am looking for a NIC based on stability and performance.
| >In short, Intel PRO/100 S Desktop Adapter(e100 driver) or
| >3Com 10/100 3C905C-TX-M(3c59x driver) ?
| >
| 
| 
| -
| To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
| the body of a message to [email protected]
| More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
| Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Ran into problems with Intel EtherExpress cards under Alpha a while back, and I've had a _lot_ of problems with the revision of the EtherExpress built into motherboards, versus the intel or kernel drivers for them.

My stock recommendation is thus SMC EtherPower II cards.

--
-- John E. Jasen ([email protected])
-- In theory, theory and practise are the same. In practise, they aren't.

I've been happy with Natsemi controllers (Netgear FA-311 and Fa-312).

Have you tried those with cables longer than 20 feet? I was totally happy with my Netgear cards with a 10ft crossover until I tried connecting a couple of new computers to my file server in the closet with 25ft CAT5 and then all the UDP (most noticeably NFS) traffic turned to crap.

I returned everything and got all D-link hardware. Works great. I'm not going to buy Netgear hardware for the foreseeable future.

Michael Sterrett
-Mr. Bones.-
[email protected]

I've had luck with them too, as well as the SMC EZNET cards (8139too driver) in workstations, windoze boxes and freebsd.

But the EZNET NICS especially seem to crack up under high load.

--
-- John E. Jasen ([email protected])
-- In theory, theory and practise are the same. In practise, they aren't.

John Jasen <[email protected]> :
[...]

Not all revisions behave the same here. For a few months, I've seen 3c905{b/c} working fine where etherpower II suffered. YMMV. A lot.

Ueimor

The SMC cards used to be Tulip before epic. I had the same module problems with epic too, so we had to go to EE from Tulip when that happened. :(

I suspect a lot of the problems depend on the motherboard or architecture, as well as the switching hardware.

Ken.
[email protected]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 12:36:24PM -0500, John Jasen wrote:

| On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Ken Brownfield wrote:
| 
| > Haven't had any issues at all with eepro100 or e100 under production
| > load for years.  Since Tulip went out of the mainstream (poor Digital)
| > the EtherExpress has been the most stable everywhere I've been.  I've
| > written too many scripts for 3Com boxes that grep dmesg for "fatal"
| > errors and unload/reload the 3com module.
| 
| Ran into problems with Intel EtherExpress cards under Alpha a while back,
| and I've had a _lot_ of problems with the revision of the EtherExpress
| built into motherboards, versus the intel or kernel drivers for them.
| 
| My stock recommendation is thus SMC EtherPower II cards.
| 
| --
| -- John E. Jasen ([email protected])
| -- In theory, theory and practise are the same. In practise, they aren't.

I didn't really start using 3coms until a couple of years ago...

yes, you can grope through the logs (as part of the process of puzzling it out) and there are ways to get the information - but it's so much nicer to just get the speed and duplex from an mii-command, on the spot.

Well, like I say it's a mixed bag. We have mail/dns servers (580 dns domains, 100,000 messages/day) that have been runing for over 600 days, and not a hint of trouble from the eepro100 drivers.

OTOH we have some new dell boxes with intel pro 100 nics where we can quickly get the "eth0 reports no resources" message and poor or no connectivity with a couple hours of apachebench on a 100 MB lan.

could be a chipset issue...

windoze desktops? give them ne2000s, who cares.

I've heard the horror stories about realtek cards, but they seem to work well for me -

Joe

On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, janvapan wrote:

Get the intel.

 Kelsey Hudson                                           [email protected] 
 Associate Software Engineer
 Compendium Technologies, Inc                               (619) 725-0771
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