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

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@xxxxxxx
http://www.ycc.com
spamSTOMPER Protected email