3c905 won't work

[Troels Arvin]

At 13:15 24-02-99 +0100, Marc Roberts <mro@aldoc.nl> wrote:
>The card
>is connected to a 3Com Superstack II TX hub at 100Mhz. On the card the
>10Mbps link indicator is on and the Activity indicator is on all the
>time.

I have the same problem with a 905 NIC connecting to a 100 mbit 3com switch.

I believe that a lot of 905 cards are buggy, but I can't document it - I
can only say that I have had seriously bad problems with 905's on both
Linux and Netware (on a Netware server, severe stability problems were
cured by changing to a dirt-cheap Realtek NIC...). And I know several other
people who have the same experiences. I a Danish newsgroup, a reseller said
that close to 5% of their shipped 905's were returned due to problems.

About the 10mbit LED being active:
Your card's auto-negotiation failed. The (not very elegant) cure: Keep
connecting/unconnecting the network cable until the card finally
understands that it's talking to a 100 mbit connection.

There are some 3com DOS utilites (see their web-site) which supposedly
should be able to force the 905 NIC to use a certain connection speed.
However, I haven't been able to make these DOS work as described :-(

The 905b NIC may be better. But after my 905 experiences, I have lost all
confidence with 3com. I will never buy 3com NICs again.


Greetings from Troels Arvin, Copenhagen, Denmark
http://www.mdb.ku.dk/tarvin/