3C905B-TX problems on fresh install

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Hi Dana,

  Unfortunately, the 3com 3C905b card is a rather so-so network card
from a hardware point of view, and the xl driver that drives it, has
had lots of fixes applied, but the driver still isn't the best driver.

  I happen to have a server right now using one of those cards and it's
rock solid.  BUT, the network card in it just happened to come out of
an IBM Aptiva running Windows 98 where it gave huge amounts of trouble -
I only put it in the BSD box to see what would happen.   After I pulled
that card out of the Aptiva I put in a cheapo Realtek and the Aptiva
has been running Win 98 solid ever since.

  In the past we used these cards under Windows - then when
those Windows boxes got too old and we started converting them to
FreeBSD and Linux, we started having lots of problems similar to what
you are seeing. Some machines would work fine, others not.  At one point
I had 3 of the cards out, all different board revisions but exact same
model number, and one of the cards would work in any box under any OS,
one of the cards would only work in some boxes but not others, and the
last card wouldn't work in anything under either Linux or FreeBSD, it
would only work under Windows.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Dana Baguley
> Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 8:57 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: 3C905B-TX problems on fresh install
> 
> 
> Hi, I'm a FreeBSD Newbie. I've had some experience with Linux,
> particularly Gentoo. I'm running a computer that I've installed
> FreeBSD on behind a router that's connected to my DSL modem. The
> router provides DHCP for all the 3 computers on my home network.
> Everything works fine with the other computers and everything worked
> fine on this computer when I was running Gentoo on it. My NIC is a
> 3Com 3C905B-TX. My motherboard is a EPOX EP-3VBA. When I installed
> FreeBSD I wanted to use FTP, but the DHCP step didn't work so I
> installed from CD. Now whenever I boot up I get the error message
> "xl0: watchdog timeout" repeatedly when dhclient starts up, when sshd
> comes up, and occasionally after boot at seemingly random times. I've
> noticed when I get this error that my link light goes off for a little
> over a second. I can only ping the localhost. Also I get an error with
> the date, time, name of my computer, and "inetd[435]: ssh/tcp: bind:
> Address already in use" every ten minutes. netstat -rn shows 10.0.0.1
> (the router) as the default gateway and 127.0.0.1 as the gateway for
> 10.0.0.100, the address assigned by the router. The correct MAC
> address for the router shows up as the gateway for 10.0.0.1.  The
> computer shows up on the router's DHCP clients table. ifconfig -a
> gives me
> 
> xl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>         options=9<RXCUM,VLAN_MTU>
>         inet6 fe80::210:5aff:fe09:f53e%xl0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
>         inet 10.0.0.100 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
>         ether 00:10:5a:09:f5:3e
>         media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) 
>         status: no active
> plip0: flags=108810<POINTTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
> lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
>         inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
>         inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
>         inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3
> 
> I don't know what to do to get networking working on this computer.
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your help!
> 
> Dana Baguley
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