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Date:      Wed, 14 Aug 2002 18:34:27 -0400
From:      Matt Johnson <mattj@maine.rr.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Problems with the xl driver or 3Com cards?
Message-ID:  <FD965646-AFD5-11D6-8FEA-00306585BF9A@maine.rr.com>

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Hi all,

I've tried everything, and I'm really lost for answers here. I have a 
FreeBSD box which has a 3Com Etherlink XL in it. A while back, I got a 
new 100mbps switch to replace my old 10mbps hub. I noticed that despite 
now having a faster network hub, my FreeBSD machine was still unable to 
get speeds of more than 200 or 300K/s.  This only happened when the 
FreeBSD machine was receiving. Transmitting worked fine.

I did a lot of testing. I tested speeds between two other machines on 
my network to make sure it wasn't the hub, and they both got about 
5MB/s to each each other. I noticed that the FreeBSD box was able to 
transmit to other machines at the full speed (5MB/s or so). The other 
machines on the network were able to do it both ways to each other as 
well. The kicker was when I tried putting in another NIC to the FreeBSD 
machine (this one used the "dc" driver) and also got full speeds both 
ways.

Naturally, I assumed my current 3Com card (which had been in there for 
going 3 years now) was faulty. The card was a 3c905B-TX.  I obtained a 
couple of spare, relatively unused 3c905-TX cards (not the 'B' model) 
and put them in my machine. I tried, and with both these cards, I had 
the exact same scenario: transmission works as it should, but reception 
seems to hit a 200K/s ceiling and fail. It happens with FTP and a few 
other transfer methods I tried. I really don't see what could possibly 
be the problem, unless there's some problem with the xl driver that I'm 
not aware of. I don't see how this could possibly have gone ignored for 
so long though, since I really didn't do anything to trigger it that I 
know of, and it's happened only with "xl" cards with 3 different cards.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

Thanks in advance,
Matt


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