[ale] NIC recommendations??

[Keith Hopkins]

jenn at colormaria.com wrote:

> In the ongoing quest for less dropped packets, I did something I should've done 2 weeks ago...ifconfig. Duh.  Here's the interesting bits of output on my external NIC on my external router (ie, the only NIC that touches IBM's network):
> 
> UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:12489015 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:17773919 errors:1044846 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:2089692
>           collisions:75672 txqueuelen:100
> 
> Uptime: 3 days
> So I believe my mystery is solved...the most recent info I can find about the particular card and driver (NetGear with a RealTek chip, driver 8139too) is for kernel 2.4.6 (I'm using .7 so not too far off).  Others have reported similar behaviour under high traffic, which explains my fluctuations in packet loss as well.  
> 
> So on to the question -- what do those of you in high-traffic environments use NICwise?  I've had success with linksys believe it or not, and miserable experiences with 3com and Intel eepro.  I'm hesitant to just patch this driver b/c I'm seeing reports that the patches don't fix this particular problem.
> 
> Any input??
> 
> TIA
> jenn
> 

Hi Jenn,

   I've been chugging along for what seems like years on NetGear FA310tx cards (Dec Tulip chip).  I have eight of them running 100M-FDX into NetGear 100M switches plus one into a 10M cable modem.
   It's all on 2.2 kernels.  I haven't tried the 2.4 yet.

Lost in Tokyo,
   Keith


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