On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Nick Holland wrote:
I found that man xl already has some information about 'command never
completed' but in this case the driver does not continue to function
normally. Is this problem a combination of old hardware with the xl
interfaces ? or are this interfaces crap too ? switching to a newer
machine (pentium 166) may help ? or should I buy another brand (which) ?
xl(4) devices are pretty far down the list as far as performance and
quality. However, I haven't seen those messages in quite some time,
and never saw them as fatal failures as you are.
HOWEVER, that being said, I haven't seen a 486 with a good PCI bus in
a while, either. Most of the "real" 486 systems with PCI busses
probably worked for something in some way on some OS, but not for me.
I am running a 486 + 16 MB RAM only even today, with three xl(4) cards
(two 3c905B and one 3c900B), one wi(4), and there also used to be one
ep(4) ISA card in the machine. It has been running for a lot of years
without a single glitch. It serves just for routing -- moderate PF setup,
BIND, DHCP. Not too heavy traffic but almost never idle. I haven't
upgraded it for recent couple of years, so it still runs 3.3 (not good, I
know). The PCI chipset is SIS496/7, the board is a lower-end Asustek,
still very reliable.
I have never had any problems with these older 3c905 and 3c905B cards
(don't know about the newer 3c905c, which looks completely different and
cheaper). But usually I prefer de(4) cards from SMC and other reliable
manufacturers. I myself would avoid any ne(4) cards, if possible.
In my experience, Gigabit cards usually don't work on PCI 2.0 and 2.1
buses, at least I have never seen one, so I think that buying one card
instead will not help.
Regards,
David
