Gig nic help needed please

[Dean Johnson]

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 13:52, Beaty, James wrote:
> Hello all. I am new to this group and not much of a Linux expert. That being
> said, I could really use some expert advise on a gig network card problem.
> This is a Dell 6450 running Red Hat 7.2, 2.4.7-10smp kernel. I  installed a
> 3Com 3C996B-T gig nic and the driver is bcm 5700 I think. The nic seems to
> run fine until it gets hit really hard with lots of traffic. Then it locks
> up and gives the following errors:
> 
> Jul 31 11:41:30 blade kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: transmit timed out
> Jul 31 11:41:30 blade kernel: eth1: Tx hung
> 
> I can either stop and restart the network or reboot the server and it will
> work for maybe a day, or maybe 10 minutes.
> 
> I want the easiest quickest fix, and if that means buying a different brand
> nic that would be fine. Thanks in advance for your help.
> 

Don will no doubt give a better answer, but my experience with that
error is that it means "cheap nic", which is kinda strange for 3com. I
could be a driver maturity issue too. Undoubtedly the time and
aggravation of "fixing the problem", would make it more worthwhile to
just go buy another brand of nic, which I typically pick the Intel gig
cards as I have never had any problems with them (except for the bad
driver in rh7.1, but thats not the nic's fault). Gig cards are cheap
now, so its generally easier to just replace it with something better. I
recall trying to fix the same type of problem with my "cheapest nic at
the local computer store" 100baseT cards. Days of fiddling with no
positive results. Then I went out and bought eepro100 cards and never
looked back. Thats just my experience...

	-Dean