> > I could not get the LinkSys LNE100TX fast ethernet card (PCI) to work
> under
> > RedHat 6.1 on a Pentium III system. The online doc says the tulip driver
> > ought to work, but it never did.
>
>Did you get the latest tulip.c driver source from the LinkSys web site and
>build a new kernel? It might not help. Then again it might.
I have now tried this, and now the card now pretends to work, but with
reliability problems (see below).
>I have a LinkSys card like you are describing, but I had trouble keeping it
>working. It would work for a while and then crap out. Re-initializing the
>card got it going again (sometimes). Other times it would wait hours before
>suddenly starting. The card worked fine in a Windoze box. That's when I
>bought the RTL8139 card. I read that they're nothing more than blocks of
>plastic glued to a board. All I can say is that they work fine in my Linux
>box. The LinkSys card wouldn't and that's why it's sitting in a drawer now.
Alerted by your experience, I copied a 250MB file twice over the
interface. Both times the copy was corrupt, first after 170MB, and second
after about 70MB. Unfortunately, the copy also traversed a Netgear FA310TX
card and a Netgear DS104 dual-speed hub, so I can't positively say the
LinkSys LNE100TX card was at fault. The good news, however, is that the
file transfer was 3.4 times faster than it was using 10MHz cards. :-)
Since the bit-error rate seems to be around 1 bit per 100MB of transfer
(based on very limited testing), this could easily be cleared up with the
simplest error-correction somewhere in the receiving software. Actually, I
thought TCP/IP itself made sure all packets arrived intact, forcing
retransmission of any bad packets. Do I need to turn on parity somewhere,
or is this bit-error-rate really a two-bit error in a single packet getting
past parity checking? If so, is there a way to specify a stronger ECC?
In the meantime, I'm going to live with 10MHz, or get 3Com cards, etc.
Be very careful using inexpensive fast ethernet cards. Be sure to use cmp
after each important file transfer to check for corruption.
Julius
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