From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 9 18:18: 8 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.gmx.net (pop.gmx.net [194.221.183.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id EED4037B422 for ; Mon, 9 Apr 2001 18:18:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from michaelnottebrock@gmx.net) Received: (qmail 15764 invoked by uid 0); 10 Apr 2001 01:17:58 -0000 Received: from pd4b9eee8.dip.t-dialin.net (HELO lofizwei) (212.185.238.232) by mail.gmx.net (mp008-rz3) with SMTP; 10 Apr 2001 01:17:58 -0000 Message-ID: <01be01c0c15c$13fd6720$0508a8c0@lofi.dyndns.org> From: "Michael Nottebrock" To: "Gunther Schadow" , References: <3AD21AE1.F715330E@aurora.regenstrief.org> Subject: Re: Who's got the cheapest 100-BT Ethernet NIC? Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 03:17:57 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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" To: 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. > [...] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message