From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Oct 12 10: 5:21 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from sol.freibergnet.de (sol.freibergnet.de [194.123.255.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D28614DD8 for ; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:05:13 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mw@sol.freibergnet.de) Received: (from mw@localhost) by sol.freibergnet.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id TAA43334; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 19:04:02 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from mw) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 19:04:02 +0200 From: Martin Welk To: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" Cc: Mike Pontillo , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NICs Message-ID: <19991012190402.A39400@sol.freibergnet.de> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.5i In-Reply-To: ; from Eric J. Schwertfeger on Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 09:06:52AM -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 09:06:52AM -0700, Eric J. Schwertfeger wrote: > After a business trip out of town, I managed to get the owner for a small > company to realize that buying the cheapest possible NICs wasn't the way > to run a consulting business. He had picked up 5 of the D-Link 10/100 PCI > nics. One wouldn't work at all (nothing we did would even show that the > card existed), one had a packet loss rate of about 30%, and none of them > wanted to work on the customers 10BaseT network. Between this and the > fact that the D-Link cards change regularly (often in ways that older > FreeBSD drivers don't like), he finally agreed to change that policy. > > We'll probably be going Intel EtherExpress Pro's in the future, though I > understand we should avoid the NEC SCSI cards with these. If you need cheap but working cards, look for the D-Link 530TX. They don't look to bad and work under FreeBSD (at least, > 3.x) with the vr (Via Rhine chipset) driver. A six-pack of them makes a price less than 25 DEM here, fifty cost even less. The Interl EtherExpress 10/100 are almost four times as expensive as the D-Link, but I would prefer them of course. But we found the Via Rhine based cards to be a good compromise in price and what you get from them. On a P-II/350 board FreeBSD get's 11 MB/sec. over them using FTP with some CPU load, but not more than 15 %. In any case, I prefer those Via Rhine cards before any Realtek based cards due to driver difficulties we experienced already before. Regards, Martin -- FreibergNet Systemhaus GbR Martin Welk * Sales, Support Systemhaus für Daten- und Netzwerktechnik phone +49 3731 781387 Unternehmensgruppe Liebscher & Partner fax +49 3731 781377 D-09599 Freiberg * Am St. Niclas Schacht 13 http://www.freibergnet.de/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message