0.91g and Kingston KNE100TX problems

[Kevin Myer]

Hi,

A few months ago, I replaced some 3Com 905B-TX cards in two servers I had,
based on their terrible performance with netatalk.  On recommendation of
several people, I went with a Tulip based card and I chose the Kingston
KNE100TX.  After fighting with a switch that wouldn't autosense full
duplex (it ended up being factory set to only do 10 or 100 but no duplex
negotiation, nicely omitted in the documentation), I finally got the cards
working and autonegotiating.

However, I am seeing massive errors on these cards and I don't now why.
And although the linkbeat is there and the cards negotiate at 100/FD
speeds with the switch, I am only getting around 220Kb/s transfer rates
between the two machines.

One machine, gneiss, is a dual Pentium II 300Mhz with 512Mb of RAM.  The
other machine, marble, is an AMD K6-2 400Mhz with 128Mb of RAM.

>From gneiss (running tulip driver v0.91):

[myer@gneiss myer]$ /sbin/ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:3B:D0:E8  
          inet addr:172.20.0.99  Bcast:172.20.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          EtherTalk Phase 2 addr:17175/163
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:28220223 errors:1 dropped:45 overruns:0 frame:1
          TX packets:39811549 errors:22859571 dropped:0 overruns:1
carrier:22859570
          collisions:0 


>From marble (running tulip driver 0.91g):

[myer@marble myer]$ /sbin/ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:3B:C0:5B  
          inet addr:172.20.20.22  Bcast:172.20.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:67576 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:714 errors:50291 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:50291
          collisions:0 

I haven't totally ruled out a cabling problem, although I had no problems
running other cards at 100baseTX-FD and getting upwards of 5000Kb/s
transfer rates previously.  I am open to ideas as to what to try.  Or
perhaps I will sit tight for a bit and try new drivers as they are
released.

Its probably not coincidence that on both machines, the errors are always
occuring when transmitting.  It almost seems like a problem with a
mismatch in duplex between the cards and the switch but mii-diag reports
on both machines:

./mii[myer@gneiss myer]$ ./mii-diag
Using the default interface 'eth0'.
Basic registers of MII PHY #1:  3000 782d 0016 f831 01e1 41e1 ffff ffff.
 Basic mode control register 0x3000: Auto-negotiation enabled.
 You have link beat, and everything is working OK.
 Your link partner can do 41e1: 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx 10baseT-FD 10baseT.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Kevin


-- 
     ~        Kevin M. Myer
    . .       Network/System Administrator
    /V\       ELANCO School District
   // \
  /(   )\
   ^`~'^