Date: Wed, 7 May 1997 11:32:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Jim Shankland <jas@flyingfox.com> To: jfarmer@sabre.goldsword.com, joe@pavilion.net, rdugaue@calweb.com Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG, jfarmer@goldsword.com Subject: Re: Most stable network card.. Message-ID: <199705071832.LAA10211@biggusdiskus.flyingfox.com>
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John T. Farmer <jfarmer@sabre.goldsword.com> writes: > Is the key to getting an efficent and robust card the present > of the Dec PCI-Ethernet chipset? If this is true, then are > there any other reasons to select one brand over another? The > reason I ask is that I've been seeing the D-Link PCI cards > (which use the DEC chipset) in the $50 range (quantity 1). No. There are annoying differences between the various cards based on the DEC chips. Can't say anything one way or the other about the D-Link cards; but for a while, newer versions of SMC's 10/100 card didn't work with FreeBSD 2.x. That's now fixed, but the Znyx 10/100 cards don't work with FreeBSD 2.2. Making them work requires getting the latest de driver from NetBSD, which in turn requires bringing over NetBSD's version of ifconfig. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as Matt Thomas, who (wrote and?) maintains the de driver, has instructions at http://www.3am-software.com/ifmedia.html. Still: the point is, these cards are *not* all equivalent. Buyer beware. I'm contemplating a switch to the Intel 10/100 cards, once my current stock of Znyx cards runs out. They're price-competitive, they are claimed to have lower CPU overhead than the de cards, and the fxp driver is well-supported in FreeBSD (not that the de driver isn't; but my sense is that keeping up with all the various vendors and their gratuitous, compatibility-breaking hardware changes is a big task). Jim Shankland Flying Fox Computer Systems, Inc.
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