[Gllug] 8139 driver problem

[Ian Northeast]

William Palfreman wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Jonathan Dye wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've got a RealTek 8139 Network card and am running RedHat 7.1 with updated
> > rpm's (Including the kernel rpm making it version 2.4.3-12).  My network
> > connection keeps being dropped (By dropped I mean it doesn't respond to any
> > network traffic even though the link lights are on) for no apparent reason
> > and the only problem I can see in the log files is the following:
> > media is unconnected, link down, or incompatible connection
> 
> Many Realtek cards are unreliable.  In fact, with any Realtek Ethernet
> card my first reaction to this kind of problem is to replace it with
> something better, like a modern £com 3c59x type thing.  You can get them
> for about £35 now.

They have that reputation. Probably some are, but I have never had a
problem and mine are some dodgy-looking things, three of which came
thrown in with my 100Mb 8 port hub for 64 quid the lot. They've been
fine in all the Linux systems we've put them in, I had one in 2.4.9 for
a while (several days at least - I think it was a week) without problem
(I took that machine back to 2.2.18 because of problems with ISDN in
2.4). The only system that's given trouble is Windows 98 and that won't
bother anyone will it:) Even that can be made to work, about two hours
of swearing per reinstall which is a lot of swearing when you think
about it.

Having said that, I wouldn't use one in a commercial environment but I
think they're fine for home use where reliability isn't such a major
issue. If I wanted something really reliable I would use an Intel
EtherExpress Pro (actually I have a couple of these too, I ..er..
acquired them). These too are around £35 - so our network admin told me
as he slipped me a couple for the PCs I don't offially have on and under
my desk. They also have the advantage of being supported in pretty much
every OS you can think of (OS/2 gave trouble. I responded by deleting
it).

The Realteks perform fine too, a highly contrived test between two Linux
machines with an 8139 and an EtherExpress maxed out at 12Mbyte/s which
is pretty much the theoretical limit of 100Mb. I've had worse results
with mega expensive IBM and 3Com stuff at work.

Regards, Ian

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