Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 21:21:34 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: Bruce Albrecht <bruce@zuhause.mn.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux and network cards Message-ID: <200104120221.f3C2LYP19789@grumpy.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Message from Bruce Albrecht <bruce@zuhause.mn.org> of "Wed, 11 Apr 2001 16:42:30 CDT." <15060.53190.561343.339737@celery.zuhause.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Bruce Albrecht writes: > I was considering sending this to -advocacy or -hardware, but I think > this is a better place. In the 4/9/01 issue of Infoworld > (http://208.185.149.153/webx?13@137.mBrzaLPgcDU^0@.ee751c7), Nicholas > Petreley writes about his problems with Linux and network cards. He > could have save himself some exasperation if he knew the rule "hubs > are always half-duplex, switches can be either", but that's not my Seemed to use the term "hub" interchangably with "switch". > real subject. I don't have any 3Com or Intel NICs, but Petreley > claims that he was unable to use his 3C905B cards with his hubs, > period, and was only able to use the Intel EEPro 100 NICs after > running some diagnostic program to switch them to half-duplex. I too read that today. Then finally logged on to their site in order to post a comment. Was stunned by his admission that Reiserfs was still not reliable, yet he uses it on everything. Presumably on the production Linux machine he is having so much trouble with? Clearly more interesting in tweaking and playing than making the machine do productive work. Interesting that he happily downloaded somebody's utility and inserted it in his system config to smack a NIC into half duplex. Apparently something the Linux driver didn't have a syscall for, or something the Linux ifconfig didn't support. > I know that with FreeBSD, I can configure the card to be either > half-duplex, full-duplex or autosense, so one of the following is > true: > > A) These cards are brain-dead, and FreeBSD can't configure them either. I am not a kernel programmer but way back in 1996 my version 0.0 21040 started having problems with FreeBSD when autosensing was being added to the de driver. So that's the last time I spent much time really reading that code. My impression was the difficulty was in figuring out *how* to set the duplex mode on the media interface on cards of different manufacture. The card doesn't set the mode, the driver has to tell it what to do. > B) Linux is brain-dead and can't configure this with ifconfig or > whatever their equivalent command. That seems to be half of it. This article triggered waves of memories of trying to use Linux in 1995. Trial and error and compromise for the right set of kernel patches. > C) Nicholas Petreley doesn't know what he's doing, and should leave > system administration to professionals. And apparently the other half. Based on Petreley's words one would think a hub provides a "collision line" to the NIC so it knows to backoff and retry in half duplex mode. > In the expanded online version, Petreley does talk about setting an > option to turn off full-duplex on the cards when setting it up, so it It was a utility he downloaded from somewhere. "Linux support is fantastic!" is what I read between the lines. What I was thinking was, "Yeah, you could download a hotfix from Microsoft too, once you know what the problem is." > could be either a Linux driver or NIC firmware problem instead of a > ID10T problem. Has anyone seen this sort of problem on FreeBSD with > either of these network cards? Of all the NICs you can buy the Intel '55[789] are probably the best supported by FreeBSD as that's what ftp.cdrom.com used for its main link for quite some time. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200104120221.f3C2LYP19789>