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List:       e-smith-devinfo
Subject:    NIC driver trouble
From:       "Michael Doerner" <michael () baypc ! co ! nz>
Date:       2000-08-30 23:04:49
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Hi,

I am still new with e-smith (and Redhat) and I thought I share some problems
where I ran into yesterday:

I had set up an e-smith (4.0) box a while ago which was very easy (nice),
using a SMC 1211TX network card. This card required the rtl8139 driver. I
did the whole setup like users, groups, ibays, etc without an problem from
another workstation's browser over the LAN. I also pointed an NT machine to
use squid as a proxy for some testing without problems.

It's running in a small LAN besides some NT machines and another Linux box
(SuSE with Samba 2.0.7), all through a 10/100 hub.

Yesterday I wanted to copy about 1 GB of data (some hundred files) from
Samba on SuSE to Samba on e-smith and it hung after some time. I suspected a
problem with the SMC card (or the driver) so I went through all related
settings again but to no avail. The problem still happened when I tried the
next time, I also found an error message at e-smith root prompt:

eth0: TX queue start entry 25165 dirty entry 25165.

I replaced the card with a SMC 9432TX, aka EtherPower II 10/100. Due to
e-smith setup screen, this card requires the tulip driver but I couldn't
start e-smith. It always failed starting with that driver.

Results:
E-smith is finally running now with an Intel Ether Express Pro 100 and I am
able to do the above 1 GB copy.
The SMC 9432TX is running perfect in the SuSE box by using a driver
'epic100' there!
The SMC 1211TX is running fine in an NT 4.0 box!

Questions:
Is there anything known to be strange with rtl8139 (perhaps on 100MB only)?
What actually *is* the right driver for SMC Etherpower under Linux?
Did I miss something by not reading docs where I should?

Sorry for the long mail.

Regards,
Michael Doerner




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