At Mon, 26 Jun 2006 it looks like Benjamin Smith composed:
> Long ago, I managed a bunch of Dell PowerEdge 1U systems running Fedora Core
> 1. The built-in driver worked for a while, but died after a few hours of
> heavy burn-in. It was a consistent failure that was fixed by downloading and
> compiling the driver from Intel (as linked to from within the Dell support
> boards)
>
> Once that was done, it worked a champ - but then I had to recompile the driver
> every time a kernel update came out. Big pain, glad I don't work there
> anymore.
>
I just had to build a few cheap storage servers, nine drives, eight drives
hanging off two promise controllers (mdadm) and went and bought new Intel
gig cards, the OS saw the cards, used the e1000 driver and the card
would work for a few seconds and die. Bought two card actually, one
for each server, tried the other card, got a bad checksum error on
the card just from to configure it the first time when the OS did
not even see it!
Well, I took the Intel gig card out and it was just the most
flimsiest fragile thing when I got to looking at it -- nothing like
the old cards of the past. Close to $55.00 each too.
Went and bought Netgear's gig card, the GA-311 and it worked and
configured right out of the box, kicks butt, was literally twice as
heavy as the Intel card and gave me that "just feels solid" in the
hand feeling, like NIC cards of the past.
I have not cranked it to see if it can handle full throttle but it
beat the experience I was having with the e1000 card.
YMMV
--
Bill Schoolcraft || http://wiliweld.com
<>
"To be unhappy over what one lacks is to
waste what one already possesses."