Asante? was Re: Cheap, good tulips...

Jon Lewis jlewis@inorganic5.fdt.net
Mon Jan 11 00:20:47 1999


Has anyone else noticed a decline in quality in tulip cards from companies
that have switched from DEC to clone chips?  I initially got around a
dozen Netgears with the 21140 chip.  I was real happy with them, so we
started buying them by the 10-pack.  Before we got our first 10-pack, they
switched to the Lite-on chips.  I've gone through about a dozen 21140's
and 20 Lite-on's.  I don't recall any 21140's going or being bad.  I've
had 1 DOA Lite-on and one "go bad" after a few weeks of service. 

On of FDT's newer systems has 4 Lite-on's and runs Red Hat 5.2.  It
crashed with ksymoops claiming the tulip driver was to blame, but I wrote
that off to it being RH's 2.0.36-0.7 pre-release kernel, and upgraded it. 
This weekend, that same system just fell off the net.  It didn't crash,
but the eth0 card stopped seeing traffic.  Rebooting didn't help. 
Swapping eth0 out for another fixed the problem. 

Is anyone else with large numbers of cards seeing similar things?

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