Who now

[Douglas Eadline]

On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Maurice Hilarius wrote:

> So, from our tests, and other reports the Lite-on based boards ( current
> Netgear, etc.) are having problems. As reported the performance is not as
> good, and sometimes the transceiver stops.
> 
> So the $20,000 question:
> Who is now making an economical tulip-based card these days???
> DLink DFE500 is end-of-life, Netgear is changed, hmmm..


A very good question.  A bit of background:

We make turn-key clusters, so we are constantly buying NICs. Things
were great the Netgear worked great (21140) never a problem.  Then
one day we get a shipment (about 16) Netgears with the Lite-On chip set.
Our first clue was the the RH 5.1 install would not work due to
and "old" driver.  OK, well we fixed this, but found the the Lite-ON
had some ARP problems and as reported is not a great performer.
(In any case I do not quite trust  it - it smacks of the "good-enough
for Windows" mentality - we all know what that means)

Anyway we started a frantic search for a vendor that:

1) knew what chip they use now and what chip they will use in their NIC
2) suppliers to sell them and can tell us what chip
   is in the NIC

(I suppose this is the downside to commodity parts - when commodity
is defined works OK with windows, then the hardware can change as
long as there is a driver disk)

In any case, we found a vendor KTI (I never really heard of them),
but the advertised "DEC 21143 chip" NICs. Urecka! Now the problem
seems to be that the implementation of the card is not quite
compatible with .90 (see  my previous post)  I think it
can be fixed, but we are off to SC 98 and a bit busy right now.

Obviously, our goal is to find a stable source of tulip cards (not a spot
market kind of thing - we buy them in 10 packs often several at a time)
The cost of the KTI cards are quite good ~$25 (our cost) but I'll
bet you can do just as well.

One of the problems is that the vendors are "slip streaming"
new chips in the NICs and not telling anyone.  We asked our
supplier (who handles about 10 lines of NICs) to check 
each one for a tulip chips (previously there were at least
3-4 models).  KTI was only one they found.  This all happend
in a bout one month.

So it is our hope that we can find a sustainable supply of NICs
at a good price so that we (the tulip community at large) do
not have to play "tulip roulette" each time we buy a new NIC.


[BTW: Don if you are at SC 98 - we are in booth 635- we will have
some of the KTIs in our cluster so we can test some things at night,
other wise we can send you one)

Doug
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