[tulip] The REALLY problem of Transmit-Timout!

[Eric Jorgensen]

	Somebody is going to slap me for suggesting this, but have you
tried the same problematic NICs and other sundry equipment with different
motherboards? 

	I'm not saying there isn't a problem -- but i think you have a PCI
issue. 

	Otherwise, *everyone* would be experiencing this kind of thing.
Right now I manage on the order of about 30 Intel 82559's and about 20
Lite-On LNE100tx's under various versions of Linux from 2.2.5 to 2.2.15. 

	The *ONLY* ones that had problems were the systems with decidedly
funky PCI busses - APPRO branded active backplane systems with
single-board SMP PII cards. These beasts have like 3 completely dissimilar
PCI host bridges in them and for some reason no PCI nic is completely
happy in them. 

	That being said, not all of the APPRO boxes here have PCI issues -
just the two most important ones (DNS servers). I have three web servers
in identical hardware that have never had a problem. 

 - Eric

> 
> Hi for all!
> 
> I have a little network with one Linux server (Pentium II 350MHz 256MB RAM 2x8GB IDE) and four Windows98 workstations (different CPU / RAM / HD / NIC / VGA). From last 2 years I have upgrade the Linux box with different distributions & kernels (RH 5.x/6.x, Mandrake 5.x/6.x, kernels 2.0.x/2.2.x). I use Samba (from 2.0.0 to 2.0.7) on Linux for emulate a NT server (very good).
> 
> The problem are the continuos TRANSMIT ERROR (timeouts) in the network. To test the network I make 'ping –t server' in any Windows client, and when 'transmit timeout' occurs I need to manually restart the HUB. With this the network restart, and we can continue out job. This problem occurs randomly: days no, days little, days heavy...
> 
> I have tested with TWO different HUBS (one 100MB x 8 ports / actually 10/100 x 8 ports); and TWO different NICs on Linux box: 3Com 905B PCI and Intel EEPRO 100+ PCI. I installed more than 20 drivers for two NICs (originals from kernel source, modified from official "Linux Network Drivers' at SCYLD (old on NASA server), modified from different people at mailing list on TUX, betas, and official drivers from 3Com and Intel), with different options (Multicast limit, max_interrupt, debug), and different compile variations (gcc/pgcc, -O/O2/O6). WITH ALL I have problems, but...