[Gllug] Cheap Linux NIC

[Jake Jellinek]

On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 09:51, Jim Bailey wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 09:13:36AM +0100, Chris Bell wrote:
> > On Mon 07 Oct, Tushar Joshi wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I'll second the rtl8139, it's all I use actually.
> > > 
> Realtek cards are brilliant value but they lack some of the features of
> NICs like the Intel pro such as PXE (the ability to perform network
> boots on diskless nodes).  This aside within there limitations they are
> a very reliable card and I have had some good throughput on them.
> 
> >    I saw a report that the earlier RTL8039 had a fixed, non random, retry
> > period after a collision which could cause trouble if there were two similar
> > cards on a network. Does this still apply?
> >
> I have had no problems with the 8139 in this respect but I understand
> there may be problems with multi-homed hosts running multiple 8139 NICs,
> maybe someone with more knowledge of this could jump in and put me
> right.

I'd agree with Tushar that these are good value and reliable cards to
use, but my experience with using more than one rtl8139 card at a time
in the same machine for fairly heavy routing is that they don't work
well at all. It may be that I should have passed different module
parameters to each card or something, but that was beyond me. Packets
were being dropped all the time.

I have a router with an rtl8139 and a Netgear FA311 together and that
works very nicely though routing several Mb/s. If you want multiple
network interfaces in a linux box as a router though, I'd now recommend
a Dlink DFE-570TX (4 ports) which seems to work well.

Cheers,

Jake.







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