Re: [tlug] Pasokon Koubou

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 12:24:01AM +0900, Botond Botyanszki wrote:

>"Eric O. Flores" wrote:
>
>> I got one Corega
>> FEther PCI-TXM network adapter,
>
>Is that the one with the Via RhineII chipset on it? This is what I have. And it's
>a load of crap.

There was a bug in the Via Rhine driver in (IIRC) 2.4.16, which was
fixed in 2.4.17.  It made my Corega with a Via Rhine work great.

The more recent Corega cards have the RTL-8139 chip.  Now
*that* is a nasty chip.  Don't recall whether it was in the
Linux driver code or one of the BSDs (I think it may have been
OpenBSD, but don't recall for sure) that described that chip
as (to politely paraphrase it) the most broken thing on earth.
The RTL symbol is a little crab on the chip.  If you see an
Ethernet card that has crabs, don't buy it :-)

The last Buffalo card I bought had an SIS chip and that has
been working well for me.

Do bear in mind that in Ethernet cards you do get what you pay
for.  A quality card like an Intel EEPro or 3Com 3c509 will
outperform the cheap cards buy a good bit.  If FE performance
is anything like GigE performance, the best cards will have double
or more the throughput of the worst ones.  Whether or not that's
worth the extra price to you is something you have to decide for
yourself.  If most of your file transfers are from the Internet and
you have a DSL uplink, the answer is probably "no."  If you have FTTH,
the answer may be different.

> Kept giving me transfer timeouts every 5 seconds with to many
>collisions.

How many machines are on that network?  Collisions on a small
LAN should be pretty rare, and shouldn't be caused by the card
(YMMV for a broken driver), since they are a result of two
hosts transmitting at the same time.  When that happens, they
both (should) back off and retransmit at some random interval.

Jonathan
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