RoadRunner Question & NIC card

[Noli Boado]

Hi, I would like to ask a couple of related questions. My friend installed
Mandrake 7. something on my old P166 PC and I have a network at home.  He
put a 10mbps NIC card as my external interface w/ RR and a 10/100 for my
internal network.  I'm noticing some sluggishness with my other windows
clients as far as browsing thru IE5.5 and once and a while, I had to reboot
my linux box because my firewall would error out "could not find host ip..."
I'm thinking maybe the 10mbps NIC is going bad (3com Etherlink).  My first
question is does it make a diff as far as speed if i use a 10mpbs and a
10/100 mbps NIC connecting to RR?  My second question is if I have to
replace my external NIC, can somebody give a step by step or how to avoid
fitfalls in replacing a NIC on a working Linux box.  I would appreciate it
very much.  Thanks.  Noli

-----Original Message-----
From: Warren Togami [mailto:warren at togami.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 9:42 AM
To: Linux & Unix Advocates & Users
Subject: [luau] Re: Scandisk


This DOES sound familiar.

What brand and model is your network card?

After transferring many packets, does your "ifconfig" output show anything
like this?

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:4C:69:6E:75:79
          inet addr:24.25.251.205  Bcast:255.255.255.255  Mask:255.255.248.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1972759 errors:3524 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1055679 errors:827 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:12368 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:286281710 (273.0 Mb)  TX bytes:99777066 (95.1 Mb)
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x1000

Can you post the output of:
ifconfig
lsmod

Any number of errors, especially those that build up over time are usually
the fault of a crappy or failing network card.  Sometimes a bad cable in
conjunction with certain cards can cause this too.  The Wiki has an
incomplete list of crappy hardware that you should avoid.
http://www.mplug.org/phpwiki/index.php?CrapHardware

You should especially avoid those CNET brand network cards at Byteware.  Out
of the 12 that I have bought over the years, 10 of them have eventually
failed with tons of errors, spitting out tons of erroneous MAC addresses on
outgoing packets.  I have heard of other people with other models of CNET
10/100 cards having the exact same problem.

A few cards that I buy these days that seem to work fine...
3Com 3c905/920 - $50+
Linksys LNE100TX v4.1 tulip kernel driver - $25
SMC EZNet 10/100 rtl1391too kernel driver - $22
DLink 10/100 has the same controller as the SMC card, but I haven't tested
it.

The really cheap SMC card comes with many name brand PC's these days, so I'd
think it is pretty safe.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rodney Kanno" <pepe65 at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 4:07 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Scandisk


> Hi Warren,
>
> I dunno if my last reply came though..I don't see it. But anyway, t seems
> like the problem i'm having has something to do with my network. For some
odd
> reason, when I disable the network, Linux runs fine, as soon as I enable
it,
> Linux runs sloow again (my 200mhz runs faster).  Any ideas/suggestions?
>
> thanks,
> Rodney
>



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