Problem with Linksys etherfast 10/100

Steve Bergman steve@netplus.net
Wed Jul 28 22:23:31 1999


Hi,

I am having a problem with a Lite-on based card.  When we switched hubs
from 10baseT to 100baseT I started seeing a very small percentage of
transmit and receive errors. (Also carrier and frame.  Could someone
please explain what the errors: dropped: carrier: overruns: and frame:
actually mean?   I have not been able to find a good explanation.)  This

would not be so bad, but the card periodically stops talking to the
network and has to be reset.  We have replaced the cable and changed
ports and I think it is just a bad card.  I have two identical cards on
two other machines talking at 100mbit over a hub.  One card gets a few
transmit and receive errors and the other gets none.  These are linksys
etherfast pci cards.  All machines are using driver 0.89H except that
I upgraded the one getting errors to 0.91(something, f, I think) to no
avail.  I am going to take the one that is not getting errors and try it

in the (original) production machine.

Here's another question.  If you were going to standardize on a 100mb
card, and wanted good reliability without too excessive a price, what
would be the best bet.  I'm partial to tulip and tulip clones but would
consider others.  Are DEC/Compaq  cards or cards with real tulip chips
any more reliable than the Linksys cards that I am using?

Steve Bergman


P.S.  (And after doing some more research.)  I note that someone else
had similar symtoms and solved it with options=13.  This is a new
linksys hub and I note that Donald was guessing that Mr. Chen was using
an older hub.  I will try this tomorrow just to be sure.  I will also
set debug=3 and post results.