Realtek 8111B LAN Chipset

[Robert Huff]

"Alphons \"Fonz\" van Werven" writes:

>  > I also want a cheap PCI/e NIC that works well with drivers 
>  > back toFreeBSD-4 like my plain PCI bge and em NICs do.  I 
>  > doubt that any popular motherboard will have anything better
>  > than a cheap PCI/e NIC. 
>  
>  Finding a modern main board of which the builtin NIC works with
>  4.X seems like a tall order to me, perhaps it would be easier to
>  install a seperate NIC.
>  
>  With some luck you might be able to pick up a decent used NIC
>  from a discarded Pentium(2) or something. I've been using a 3Com
>  3c509 combo card for years. In 3.X the driver was still buggy,
>  but it worked great with 4.X, particularly the later ones, say,
>  4.5 onwards.

	Not responding to the above directly, but:
	1) RealTek has a reputation for making cheap-ass cards - not
just "point-and-laugh", but "point-and-spit".
	2) If you're going with a separate card, allow me to recommend
the Intel Pro/1000 series.  Major manufacturer, driver written by
Intel (and the maintainer responds promptly to issues), and
available for ~$25 on eBay.


				Robert Huff