RoadRunner Question & NIC card

[Noli Boado]

thanks much.  noli

-----Original Message-----
From: Warren Togami [mailto:warren at togami.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 8:29 PM
To: Linux & Unix Advocates & Users
Subject: [luau] RE: RoadRunner Question & NIC card


I have had an ISA 3Com 10Mbps 3com Etherlink cards die on me.  After I
replaced it with a $25 PCI 10/100 NIC, I realized that it was severely
hindering my RoadRunner performance.  My top speed went from about 80KB/sec
to 1.1MB/sec.

Although RoadRunner itself has only 10Mbps link, there's no reason why you
should buy another 10Mbps card usually available only for ISA.  It will
simply go faster with a PCI bus-mastering card, and prices for a decent card
are as low as $20 locally.

$20 SMC EZNet 10/100 (rtl8139too kernel driver)
$25 Linksys LNE100TX v4.1 (tulip kernel driver)

Before you buy a card, you must be sure that you have a free bus-mastering
PCI slot.  Some motherboards have only one bus-mastering PCI slot (slot 2),
while some have all but one (everything except the first slot).  "Shared PCI
and ISA" slots that can be used only one at a time are never bus-mastering.
Some motherboards have bus-mastering as a configurable option in the BIOS.

The hardware autodetect features of Linux should pick up most card changes,
except you may need to upgrade to a newer Linux with a newer kernel for
these PCI network cards.  Both of these cards need more recent kernel
drivers then the kernels found in the earlier Mandrake 7.x series.
The hardware detector program of Mandrake is called "HardDrake".  It will
run during boot-up and make configuration changes.  Red Hat has "kudzu".  I
don't know what other distributions use.

If you must upgrade your Linux, I suggest going straight for Mandrake 8.0,
or wait two weeks for Mandrake 8.1 that will be released by the end of
September.  If you have less than 32MB of RAM, I don't suggest upgrading to
newer Linux (with the 2.4 kernel) and instead go to OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
With the new 2.4 kernel in a new Linux distribution, you are recommended to
use Netfilter/iptables if you have sufficient RAM.  I wrote a guide that
describes one method of using iptables here
http://www.mplug.org/phpwiki/index.php?BasicFirewallRouter

----- Original Message -----
From: "Noli Boado" <Noli at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 1:57 PM
Subject: [luau] RE: RoadRunner Question & NIC card


> 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
>



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