On Wednesday 08 October 2003 18:29, Edward Murrell wrote: > On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 01:56, David Palmer. wrote: > > But as all of this is going to applied later in a commercial > > environment, I was wondering if anybody would be able to advise as to a > > decent make of commercial standard Nics. > > First off, avoid anything with a realtek chipset. That should avoid 90% > of problems. > > Depending on the price performance ratio, I've found CNet PRO 200s to be > good at the cheap end (Davicom chipset - dmfe driver). I have three of > these in one of my routers, which has been running nonstop for a good > three years now. They handle medium amounts of traffic fairly well, but > I wouldn't use them in my main server, where high CPU usage could impact > their performance. > > If you need good 100mbps performance under load, you can't go wrong with > Intel. The 3Com 3c905Bs I use in my workstations also seem to take > anything I can throw at them (including trying to run Q3A X11/OpenGL > over a network, just to see if I could ;). > > DEC Tulips (if you can find them) in my experiance are picky. When they > work, they work brilliantly, but I've always had major issues with full > duplex settings, and getting them to not kill the interface when the > cable is unplugged (which also does fun things like stop the DHCP > server). > > Edward
Here's a link that supports what's said here (http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/). I especially like the link within the page that points to detailed description of why Realtek is much hated. I have too many Realteks. I bought them in an attempt to build the world's cheapest servers. I don't stress the NICs very hard so they chug along. They are CPU cycle theives however and that directly affects what I am trying to do. They will get replaced when I get back to performance analysis. If you are trying to build a cheap workstation then the Realtek NIC can save you a _few_ monetary units. Keep in mind that everytime you ask for help with those NICs you'll get chastised. IIRC, in the .config for the kernel the rtl drivers are suppressed as options unless you choose: # # Code maturity level options # CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL=y How's that for a subtle message from the kernel wizards? Realtek is _real_ cheap. But if you bang your head on them from functional problems and they rob you of performance even when they are working satisfactorily, the savings are questionable. -- Mike Mueller 324881 (08/20/2003) Make clockwise circles with your right foot. Now use your right hand to draw the number "6" in the air. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
