[vortex-bug] [3c905B] 2kb/s receive, 30kb/s transmit

[Adam]

[PS I think I mistakenly posted on this topic to the
3c509 forum instead of the 3c905 - apologies all
concerned.]

I have previously on many occasions had problems with
3c905 cards, under winNT and 2k you often have to
manually force them to 10Mbps (rather than allow
auto-negotiation, which for whatever reason is F****ed
up).

[N.B. Have had this problem on dozens of 3com cards,
in different offices many times...]

Even had it with linux sometimes, and managed to sort
it by judicious use of passing different options=
strings to Mr Becker's driver (and forcing appropriate
modes).

But now all is pear-shaped, and I CANNOT get a
(relatively) newly installed machine to work at more
than 2k/s receive, 31k/s transmit. (this is the same
symptom that normally occurs when there are
auto-negotiation problems). I found that if I
parallelised 12 uploads (all PASV mode), I could
upload total bandwidth of approx 12k/s, but adding
more threads/more uploads beyond 12 started reducing
total bandwidth.

I have tried:
 - options = 0 or 2 or 10 (normally forcing 10baseT
fixes things)
 - full_duplex = 0 (sometimes duplex problems too?)

But nothing has any effect this time.

Using debug=6, I get the following (?kernel?) message
when trying to upload a file via FTP (running a recent
ProFTPd):

boomerang_rx(): status e001
Rx error: status 8c

(stuck in the middle of many other messages, but this
is the only apparent error).

It keeps coming up many times in the middle of
stuttering uploads.

Looking through the archives, others seem to have had
similar but different problems with auto-neg (even
though the advice given is nearly always
"auto-negotiation works really well", the number of
times people have to work around it to get their setup
to work seems to disagree).

Hardware setup:

 - 3c905B in linux 2.4.18 server, running ProFTPd (all
from Mandrake 8.2 - I am 99% sure I've had the same
model 3com NIC working from the same Mandrake CD's
before)
 - 24-port unintelligent 10Mbps hub (have had several
3c905 cards working on this hub under win2k and winNT
before, side-by-side with a variety of 3c509B and
other brands)
 - almost-new CAT5 network cables which have been
swapped around many times over, but the problem
remains with this one server
 - problem is independent of client (have tried with
another 3c905b running from win2k, AND with a D-Link
USB NIC running from linux 2.4.18, on different
physical machines).

Adam

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