Not to whine, but [more details on NIC problem]

[Bill Gradwohl]

Richard Crawford wrote:

>William and Jim: It is indeed a 3com card.  More specifically,
>3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 74).  The bug file that William pointed to
>looks familiar, but I have never encountered this problem before under
>any other kernel; I even had the SMP version of a 2.4 kernel running
>before without difficulties.
>
>The computer is a dual-processor PIII with 512MB RAM.  It's not a laptop
>computer.  I'm running FC2, with the 2.6.9-1.6_FC2 kernel.  The problem
>occurs when I try to run the SMP version of the same kernel.
>  
>
I've got a TYAN Dual P3-800 around here as a test box. Ram is either 1 
or 2 Gig. I know I've had it up and moving lots of traffic on my network 
under FC3 and the NIC was a 3COM 3C905C-TX-M. I'll get that box up again 
to double check the rev level etc. I'll let you know.

BTW - I've heard of problems with 3COM cards, but I've got lots of them, 
as do my clients, and never experienced a problem myself.

I also run the much maligned ASUS P4P800-VM and it never gave me any 
issues either. Right now I've got that mainboard doing firewall duty 
under FC2 and it IS using a 3COM on the public side:

01:0b.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] 
(rev 78)

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:04:75:7E:1B:FF
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:772106 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:301604 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:214713549 (204.7 Mb)  TX bytes:27677562 (26.3 Mb)
          Interrupt:5 Base address:0xdc00

I mention this because I set my BIOS up the way I want it to function as 
the first thing I do on a box. Maybe these problem issues can be traced 
back to BIOS settings to explain why it works one place and not another. 
I've moved boards around into different slots to get the system to give 
me the interupts I wanted. Maybe its physical positioning in the slots? 
Are you sharing interrupts when moving the board around could get you an 
interrupt thats not shared?

-- 
Bill Gradwohl
bill at ycc.com
http://www.ycc.com
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