Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:58:05 -0600 (MDT) From: "Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc@iMach.com> To: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" <ejs@bfd.com> Cc: Mike Pontillo <mike_p@revenge.pylos.net>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NICs Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.991012113001.29012B-100000@workhorse.iMach.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910120900130.15303-100000@harlie.bfd.com>
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> After a business trip out of town, I managed to get the owner for a small > company to realize that buying the cheapest possible NICs wasn't the way > to run a consulting business. He had picked up 5 of the D-Link 10/100 PCI > nics. One wouldn't work at all (nothing we did would even show that the > card existed), one had a packet loss rate of about 30%, and none of them > wanted to work on the customers 10BaseT network. Between this and the > fact that the D-Link cards change regularly (often in ways that older > FreeBSD drivers don't like), he finally agreed to change that policy. This isn't meant as a flame - sometimes I get a little carried away when I have a strong feeling about something. I utilize $9.00 Ethernet cards almost 100% of the time here. Currently I'm using the CNET PowerNIC's for the ISA and another brand for the PCI. Almost never have problems. The real trick is that once you find a consistent brand/model to stay with it. I used to use the cheap ones in house and 3coms for all of my customer work. With the idea that the 3com's were better. However, I have now switched to using the cheaper NIC's almost exclusively. The reason? I have had an incredible amount of problems with 3com nics. NICS that crash servers, Nics that don't work, etc. FAR more than with the sub-$20 nics. Now mind you, I've had a couple of manufacturers of sub-$20 nics that I will never buy from again, but with careful purchasing when dealing with a new vendor (buy 2-3 and use them, and then 10 and then... whatever quantity you really need) you can usually determine the bad manufacturers within the first $100 of expenditure. I haven't had to go through this for quite a while, though as CNet seems to be quite stable. That said, the Intel EtherExpress family seem to work EXTREMELY well and extremely good. I put them in all my customer's "high-end" freebsd boxes and in my customer's high-end servers. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) KD7EHZ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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