[sclug] 3c509

[Dickon Hood]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 16:48:57 +0100, Darren Davison wrote:

: I revived an old box recently that's been switched off for ages, it has a 3Com
: NIC inside configured to use the 3c509 kernel module.

Very old...

: Transfer speeds on my LAN to this box are woeful (max 768 KiloBytes/s - not
: much more than my ADSL speed!).  Is this just due to the card/driver being so
: old or is there a parameter or something I can supply to the module to fix it?
:  Perhaps the card is damaged?

768KB/s seems reasonable, TBH.  The 509's only a 10Mb/s card anyway; you
shouldn't expect to see more than about 800KB/s out of it under ideal
circumstances (~950KB/s at peak if it's one device bombarding another one
with packets and getting nothing in return).

: Obviously I can replace the card cheaply if need be, but the box is fairly
: inaccessible and I'm looking for the lazy option :)

I'd upgrade the hardware to something faintly modern if you want anything
better out of it.  You're likely using 10Mb/s half-duplex, which is what
that card will default to.

If you meant 3c905, that's a different matter :-)

-- 
Dickon Hood

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