On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 11:35:31AM -0400, brad demirjian wrote:
> I have read quite a few stories about the tulip based NIC and the varying
> accounts of them. I am interested in positive accounts of the tulip NIC
> holding up under load (i. e. large file downloads, or multiple user loads).
> I have a tulip based NIC (DEC 21140) and I want to know if I should take it
> out. Under Monkey$oft the card has never given me any problems.
We've been using Tulip cards in our servers and router here for more than
three years.
The router was routing around 70GB per day, during the last year or so, over
two Tulip cards. It _never_ had a problem. The two other servers also running
Tulip (one NT one Linux) also didn't have any NIC-related problems.
These are my experiences, with one type of Tulip card (don't have the manufacturer
or serial numbers handy though):
Pro Tulip:
* Rock solid. Once they run, they keep running.
* Fast. You get very close to 100Mbit (90 something, over TCP on a P133)
Con Tulip:
* Auto-negotiation doesn't really work.
* Some tulip boards work great with the driver, and others simply doesn't work
at all. That said, I prefer a board/driver that either works completely, or
not at all, to one that _almost_ works.
As an experiment we put in three 3Com 3c590-B cards into the router when we
upgraded it (now a PIII/450). So far it's been running stable, a little bit of
a surprise to me, considering all the hassle there was with the 3Com cards some
time back. But to be honest, I don't think we get a higher bandwidth from a
3Com card on the new machine, than we got from the Tulip on the P133. Of
course, the machine is a lot faster (it's also firewalling, packet logging and
mail-serving), but that was to be expected with the new CPU/motherboard/disks/etc.
Tulips are really good, if you get them running in the first place, and if you
don't need to plug them into 10/100 FD/non-FD all the time. Give them one link
and they'll be happy and hard working.
My $0.02
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