3C905B-TX problems on fresh install

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Tue May 17 22:44:45 PDT 2005


The RealTek 8139 is also an iffy card, but not in the same way
the 3c905 is.  With the 3c905 you have a lot of timing/driver
issues to where you get different results depending on what
motherboard your using it in.  With the Realtek, they always work
from that standpoint, the problem is that sometimes their autodetection
goes haywire and you have to hard-code them to a specific speed
and duplex in your ifconfig statement.  They also don't have an
optimal register setup and so consume more CPU to get data in and out
of the card.  You wouldn't use one in a FreeBSD router, but other
than that, they are fine under FreeBSD.  I use about 3 or 4 of them
myself.

Realtek also has developers who actually run FreeBSD themselves
and have contributed code to the rl driver in FreeBSD, which is a 360
degrees shift from 3com's "I never heard of FreeBSD and I don't want
to know about it" attitude.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dana Baguley [mailto:dana.baguley at gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 10:34 PM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: 3C905B-TX problems on fresh install
>
>
> Thanks, Ted. Exactly what I needed to know. The easiest card for me to
> pick up to replace it with is a realtek 8139d. Any opinion on that
> card or the rl driver?
>
> On 5/17/05, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
> > 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> > > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to
> > > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> > >
> >
>



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