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Date:      Tue, 10 Apr 2001 03:17:57 +0200
From:      "Michael Nottebrock" <michaelnottebrock@gmx.net>
To:        "Gunther Schadow" <gunther@aurora.regenstrief.org>, <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Who's got the cheapest 100-BT Ethernet NIC?
Message-ID:  <01be01c0c15c$13fd6720$0508a8c0@lofi.dyndns.org>
References:  <3AD21AE1.F715330E@aurora.regenstrief.org>

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I recently built myself a home nat router with FreeBSD and bought two
cheap noname cards for $19 each, which had a sticker on them that said
'Linux supported'. I wanted to do the thing with Linux first, but I
had only an oldish 486 with 8 megs and no recent Linux Distro would
run properly on that machine, so I got FreeBSD to do the job. It
turned out that these cards were Davicom DM9102-based cards, which are
supported by the 'dc' driver since FreeBSD 4.0.

Funny enough, I had to trash the 486 because it had such a horribly
broken PCI chipset (of ALi make, shudder) that the interfaces would
inevitably go down after a few days, sometimes taking the whole
machine with them. I first suspected the NICs to be the culprit, but
then I stuck a realtek 8139-based card into the box and that thing
went down after _minutes_! I later learned, that this difference is
due to the really braindead design of the 8139 chips - the Dawicom
cards at least have a FIFO buffer... Now I run everything on a P90
with 24megs of RAM - but I haven't reverted to Linux :)).


Greetings,

Michael Nottebrock

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gunther Schadow" <gunther@aurora.regenstrief.org>
To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 10:26 PM
Subject: Who's got the cheapest 100-BT Ethernet NIC?


> Hi,
>
> I know the Ethernet cards for 20 bucks are available from Hawking or
> Kingston or what those brand names are. But I don't know whether
they
> work well with FreeBSD and the notes in the LINT kernel are not
> exhaustive on these cheap OEM and whatever products. Please everyone
> who believes he's got one 100-BT PCI card for below $50 working
well,
> I would appreciate hearing which card it is, which driver you use.
> Also if you have had problems with cheap cards please let me know
too.
> [...]


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