Transmit timed out

[Gerhard Sittig]

On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Peter Hanecak wrote:

> On 16 Feb 1999, Osma Ahvenlampi wrote:
> 
> > Is this an SMP box? Have you compiled your kernel with SMP support
> > enabled? Up to now, I've only heard of "transmit timed out" in
> > reference to multicast and possibly on SMP systems. All I can really
> > verify is that on the three single-processor systems (with Intel
> > EEPro100 cards) I've experienced this problem, it always went away
> > with multicast_filter_limit=3.
> 
> it is single processor. no SMP.

I had "transmit timeout"s too, here.  It was a single CPU
machine (ASUS SP3, 486DX/2-66, 32MB, 82557 EEPro100B).  I was
using drivers from the 2.0.35 kernel and upgraded them through
the versions up to 0.99C (?).  As soon as I put ANY packet
through this card I got timeouts.  But I always blamed this on
the board -- none of the 3com PCI cards I tried even allowed
to computer to boot (3c590, 3c900, 3c905).  And the fact that
I tested the card in this board with the DOS tools (more than
one mio packets went without an error) doesn't mean much under
a real OS speaking to the hardware in a different way :>

So it might not just be an SMP issue, but a problem of loaded
machines?  But since I switched to another computer I used the
EEPro in that machine and put a cheap NE2000 in the old one.
So I didn't follow the "tx timeout" problem any further.

> by the way, is is possible that my adapter is broken? is there some
> "clever" way how to test it without installing windows and verifying with
> drivers from producer?

Get the driver disks from Intel and boot DOS from a floppy
(there are free versions of DOS around).  You won't need
any more than ten MB drive space (reuse a swap partition
for a moment ?) or might find a floppy sufficient at all.
But that's just a basic check (see above) and you might need
a second machine running the diagnostic software under DOS as
a partner (one machine is your test candidate and the other
one is set up as a responder).


Gerhard Sittig
-- 
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