autosensing 3C905B

[Anirudh Modi]

Hi,

	I noticed that you have a Dell Precision 410 workstation. I run
several of those (25 of those in fact) as a cluster for our research
group: 

		http://cocoa.ihpca.psu.edu

They have been running great! If it be of some use to you, you can
download the kernel I use from:

	http://bart.aero.psu.edu/linux/vmlinuz_latest

Although this is a somewhat older kernel (2.0.35 #18), it works perfectly
with all the hardware (I had struggled quite a bit with this a couple
of months back to get everything right). My 3c905B runs at  100 Mbps
full duplex without any problems whatsoever (in fact I have two of these
on my server which is also a Dell 410).

-anirudh
[http://bart.aero.psu.edu]

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, Werner Depoorter wrote:

| 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
| 
|