autosensing 3C905B

[Werner Depoorter]

Hello,

Last week I tried to install redhat 5.2 on a Dell Precision 410.  This
computer has a on(mother)board 3C905B Cyclone ethernet adapter.  When
thesystem arrived, I installed NT to ensure that everything worked OK.  It
did.

After installing Linux, some PC's on our network crashed when the system was
booted.  More precisely: when the ethernet adapter was activated.  I took a
network analyser, and it seemed that a lot of garbage was dumped over the
network when the system was started.

After trying a lot of things, it seemed that the adapter was configured as
autosensing.  When I configured the adapter as 10Mbit (which is the speed of
our network; we don't have a 100 MBit hub)
the problem disappeared.

Because the problem didn't appear with NT (I installed NT again on the
machine to test it; I wanted to know if it was a hardware or a software
problem), I think this may be called a bug in the Linux driver.

I hope this information may be useful.

Greetings,

Werner Depoorter
depoort@charlie.luc.ac.be