[vortex] Problems with 3c59x driver network adapter stops working

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Juergen Vigna wrote:

> On another one on our main network where there is any time at least
> a background traffic of 10K (I see this on my network monitor), there
> is the problem that the ethernet card seems to work _really_ slow,
> it still is accessible, but you practically cannot work with it as
> it is too slow.

Could you check with mii-tool what the media type is when this happens ?
It would probably be helpful as well if you could fetch vortex-diag from 
ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/diag and send us the output from "vortex-diag -v"; 
and while we're at it, mii-diag (from the same place) might offer better 
diagnostic than mii-tool.

> Hope this explains the situation a bit better.

Yes, but offers no clue as to why it happens :-(

> What I did now (as I've seen that the described kernel module options
> don't work for a 3c905B) I tried to disable autonegotiation and fix
> it to 100baseTx-FD with mii-tool (of RedHat), too see if I have the
> same problem.

The media should be either forced or let autonegotiate at _both_ 
ends of the link, so if you forced it on the NIC, you should also 
force it on the switch - otherwise duplex mismatches are very likely 
to occur and performance will be bad.
Please let us if forcing media hepled with the problem. If it didn't, 
please also try to enable autonegotiation again then when the problem 
appears, run "mii-diag -r" or even "mii-diag -R" and see if this has any 
influence (after running mii-diag -r/-R please wait at least one minute 
until declaring that the link is dead).

> I would be really gratefull to have any informations on this, otherwise
> is there any other good network-card for Linux which one could buy
> (for the future) which does not have this type of problems.

Well, I do have some 905B cards here and I never had problems with them 
(but they are under sustained network traffic). I also have 905C cards and 
also no problems with them...

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De