Howdy, On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 18:37 -0400, fredex wrote: > All I know is that I've never had any trouble with Realtek chipset > NICs. But I must admit I've not used any of 'em with FC5, either. Ever try using em with FreeBSD 5.x/6.x/7.x? > I'm currently running two of them in the old Smoothwall firewall box > (8139 cards) and it had no trouble at all. My current Firewall/Router box is an ex Smoothie with three 8139C nics. Switched it over to IPCop & suddenly discovered m0n0wall which is FreeBSD based & running as we speak. Bet yours are 8139Cs also. I once built a Smoothie for a customer with two 8139D nics. Nothing but problems. Exchanged them for two 8139Cs & all was well. IIRC correctly, there was some discussion about RealTek nics, a few years back, on the Smoothwall list. Bottom line is, these nics use CPU processing power the same way a win modem does. The m0n0wall box, is accessible via a web browser that's SVG enabled & I can see real time performance of the CPU. If I shut down m0n0wall, switch out the RealTek nics with either Intel/3Com, CPU usage goes way down compared to the RealTeks. BTW, did you know the founder of Smoothwall (I assume you know who I mean ;-) ) is one of the backers/funders of m0n0wall? > my desktop, which is running Centos 4.4 has a builtin 8169 (not a separate > card) and it also works perfectly. Not much you can do about a builtin, short of disabling it in the BIOS & installing a pci Intel/3Com nic. Should give you a performance boost though. > So, either FC5 has some oddity in how it recognizes/enables realtek > chipsets, or the particular card you have has done something that > breaks the otherwise easy-to-use chipset. No clue what. My theory is this, ya save a ton of money by not paying $Microshaft prices. Why not splurge a little on some top quality nics? taharka Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
