Dual ethernet card

[Bryan Vyhmeister]

On Friday, May 9, 2003, at 02:09 PM, Don Lewis wrote:

> On  9 May, Randy Smith wrote:
>> On Fri, 9 May 2003, D.Pageau wrote:
>>
>>> Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 11:07:29 -0400
>>> From: D.Pageau <dpageau at infodev.ca>
>>> To: "freebsd-isp at freebsd.org" <freebsd-isp at freebsd.org>
>>> Subject: Dual ethernet card
>>>
>>> I have a FreeBSD box in 1U Rackmount case, I only have one PCI slot
>>> availaible (1U) and I need 3 Ethernet interfaces, one is onboard the
>>> other 2 interfaces should be a dual ethernet card.
>>>
>>> Do you have any experience with this kind of interface, which one
>>> (brand/model) is know to be working fine under FreeBSD.
>>>
>>
>> I've had good experiences with Intel PRO/100 S nics. (It'll get even
>> better as FreeBSD gets support for the hardware encryption in the 
>> nics.) I
>> have a couple of 2U servers with them and they have run without any 
>> nic
>> related problems.
>
> I wish I could say the same.  I've got two of these and they have
> problems when used with recent versions of the fxp driver in -current.
> Packets of certain sizes get truncated.  It is possible to test for the
> problem by doing
> 	ping -c 216  anotherhost
> 	ping -c 1696 anotherhost
> 	ping -c 3176 anotherhost
> 	ping -c 4656 anotherhost
> My cards work fine until I get to size 3176, but I've seen a report 
> from
> someone who had problems with all of the above packet sizes.  It's
> fairly easy to get things working again by a simple patch to the 
> driver,
> but that disables the newer features on these cards.
>
> My cards also have a problem at initial power up.  When the box is 
> first
> powered up the cards are not visible to either the BIOS or to FreeBSD.
> They aren't even visible to Intel's DOS-based diagnostic .exe program.
> Hitting the reset switch during the boot or logging onto the console 
> and
> rebooting will fix the problem until the next time the system is 
> powered
> down.  The problem happens in two different systems, one is
> Celeron-based, and the other is an AMD Athlon-XP.  The cards are IBM 
> OEM
> numbered and I got them fairly cheap, so I don't know if there's
> anything funny about that particular flavor.

Interesting. I have been using lots of Intel cards and I have never had 
any problems of any kind. All of my cards are either onboard on Intel 
motherboards or Intel brand cards. I have also been using the Intel 
10BT/100BTX PILA8472C3 PRO/100 S Dual Port server adapter. It has 
worked very well also. The machine with the dual port card is my 
firewall for my whole network and has been running rock solid for a 
long time. I have not used them with anything past 5.0 though. I tried 
all four ping combinations and they all work fine on the cards I tried.

Bryan