Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 01:17:48 -0400 From: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: xl driver for 3Com Message-ID: <199905301715.NAA24924@mail.svr.vastnet.net> In-Reply-To: <199905292159.RAA01509@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> References: <199905291712.NAA13802@etinc.com>
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At 05:59 PM 5/29/99 -0400, you wrote: >Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Dennis had to >walk into mine and say: > >> >Then *FIND THEM OUT*! Replacing the cards does not fix the problem! How >> >is anybody supposed to be able to help you if a) you never tell anybody >> >about the trouble, b) you destroy the test configuration where the problem >> >occurs, thereby assuring that nobody will be able to duplicate it again, >> >and c) you don't even lift a finger to investigate! >> >> I dont want help, > >That's too bad because you really need it! > >> I recommended Intel cards, the customer used 3coms >> because "someone told them they were good cards", they had problems, and I >> said "I told you so". Im just relaying the info..if I had REAL info as the >> what the problem was I would have told you, but commercial sites are not >> the place to be debugging problems. > >They are the *perfect* place to be debugging problems! Who do you think >causes most of them!? And just what kind of information did you think you >were relaying? Couldn't you be bothered to invest a few seconds to at >least find out what version of FreeBSD they had? And how much are you going to pay them to have their people debug a problem that can be fixed by using another card? You academics crack me up. > >> I have no stake in 3com cards (they are >> problematic in LINUX as well)...maybe the cards are flawed? Its not my >> problem. > >It *is* your problem. Supposing you can't get Intel cards anymore. >Then what're you going to do. Use something else that works. If none of them work then FreeBSD is no longer a viable option. > >> Not that I wouldnt like to help, but when I have a company president >> calling me to complain that the box is going down Im in no position to say >> "stick with the 3com cards, they'll have them running soon." Its the way >> it is. > >No, that's not the way it is. You can't play musical hardware forever. >Sooner or later you're going to run into a situation where you won't >have another hardware option, and then your company president is going >to find out just how useless you are and replace you. Yes you can. If intel stops producing cards them some other card will become the darling of Freebsd. All OSes have a few cards that are battle tested and lots of other ones that work ok if you dont try to do too much with them. It IS the way it is, and its the way its been with PC unices since the days of XENIX 286. Why is the DEC PCI driver so good in linux and so crappy in FreeBSD? Because they spend a LOT more time on it, and it is highly supported. Nobody cares about it in FreeBSD, when I complained that my -AC revision wouldnt probe on a 10mb/s network (it STILL doesnt work a year later), I switched to intel because noone seemed to care. They kept telling me to port Matt's netbsd driver. Why should I deal with that headache when I can just use something else? > >> You need to find beta test sights (gee, columbia might be a good >> one, huh?) to do testing. Commercial sites are no place for such things. > >You just don't get it do you! In order to be able to fix a problem, >you have to be able to duplicate it! I do this for a living, you think I dont get it? Some customers let me fix bugs when they have them, some are less patient. Until I get a customer who is willing to work with me, then it doesnt get fixed. I just fixed a problem last week that has been haunting me for months, because i FINALLY got someone to do a dump analysis rather than just whine about it. You have to have customers that are technically competent to work with. The 3com customer had a bridge set up between a $75,000 cisco with a T3 and over 2000 hosts. You cant ask them to take their network down because their ethernet card is locking up every few hours. Be real. >I have tons of 3Coms here and they >all work perfectly! If somebody has a problem with one, it's because >they've put together a particular hardware and software configuration >that triggers some pathological behavior. It's not fair then to expect >somebody to be able to fix your problem i I didnt ask you to fix my problem, did I? The last problem I had I gave you the patch because my customer let me fix it and it was easy to find. This time they weren't patient and were ready to cancel the order. And they didnt know what they were doing. They needed a plug and play solution, which is why they bought my product in the first place. > >> I used to recommend DEC cards, and now the driver sucks, so I dont. I >> recommend DEC or Intel in LINUX, because they work best. I dont care what >> they use, and Im not concerned about the 35 drivers that have problems >> under load. I cant be. I dont have time, and what's the difference? All >> cards have the same functionality. > >The difference is that not everybody has access to all hardware! The >difference is that not everybody can afford all hardware! The difference >is that all cards don't get manufactured forever! The difference is that >if you can't be bothered to get off you ass and actually report bugs >properly and take some time to try testing a fix, pretty soon nobody >will want to be bothered writing software for you anymore! Are you guys writing this for me? Gee Thanks :-) LOL...Well if some guy in the baltics cant get intel cards then he's probably running LINUX anyway. > >> hey, you want to be famous, you gotta take some punches. When my drivers >> have bugs, I take it on the chin. Part of the developer experience. :-) > >Don't you smiley at me! How would you feel if people just gradually >stopped buying your products, and then one day you found out that it was >was because of some silly little bug in your code that you could have >fixed in fiv minutes if only somebody had cared enough to actually tell >you about it? You'd be pretty pissed off, wouldn't you! More than that, >your boss would be pretty pissed off too! My boss doesnt get pissed off :-) We'll you're not selling your driver or 3com cards, so the analogy is a bit off. This, in fact, happens all the time, and it MY responsibility to have expensive test beds to reproduce the problems. People who buy "free" software dont understand that commercial products are often better because the commercial companies spend a lot of money developing, testing and supporting their products. 98% of the bugs we fix are recreated in our test beds and fixed that way...its not feasible to fix things in other people machines. You rely on cooperation to get things fixed...people who've spent thousands of dollars on a product are entitled to expect it to work. > >So, tell me: just how many of you other people reading this have been >having problems with 'drivers under load' and couldn't be bothered to >actually report the problem? Hm? Well what're you waiting for?! Go on: >speak up! Take two minutes of your precious time! I dare you! I >double-dare you! No, I *triple*-dare you! Take your best shot! I did report it. I have never liked 3Com as a company and I dont recommend their cards. They build crappy products (they had a totally defective frame relay router because their engineers had no clue how frame relay worked). I told my customer not to use it before they purchase my product. Now they respect my opinion. Its my job to know the best choices...thats why my customers pay me...to save them weeks of headaches. I was evaluating a MB that had a built-in realtec ethernet controller. YOUR comments in the driver said it was a piece of crap. Should I use it anyway? No, I use something that I know works. Perhaps our bandwidth manager puts an unusual load on the card when it unloads its queues (which could present a large amount of traffic in a short time.) If you'd like a key to test with, just ask for it. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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