[Samba] conflict between Realtek 8139 (client) and3c2000T(server) NIC's with Samba?

[John Snowdon]

Completely agree.

I used to have 8139c cards in my home machines, on a switched 100mbit network, including a Dual P3 server that I run 4 x 80G drives with a HPT454 RAID5 array (software I know, but the dual P3 copes admirably), both the server and my main desktop (dual Athlon MP 2600) were getting to the point of being unusable when such high CPU useage when transferring large documents (Quark files, uncompressed TIFF's etc., saving was becoming a nightmare - 30-45s to save a 60mb Quark document!) ... I ripped them both out and replaced them with Intel PRO100/S Server adaptors.. they're about £25 each and the cpu use when transferring large files is a fraction of what it once was (2-3% in Windows task manager).

Those Realtek cards are now sitting in machines that my family only use for web browsing... and with ADSL, they still taxes the cpu more than they should, in fact, I'd hazard a guess that a couple of old 3C509B ISA cards would probably hit the cpu less.

 John Snowdon - IT Support Specialist
-==========================================-
 School of Medical Education Development 
 Faculty of Medical Sciences Computing
 University of Newcastle

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Malcolm Baldridge [mailto:google at paypc.com] 
>Sent: 26 May 2004 09:50
>To: samba at lists.samba.org
>Subject: Re: [Samba] conflict between Realtek 8139 (client) 
>and3c2000T(server) NIC's with Samba?
>
>
>
>> I *might* be a Realtek issue...  I have heard that Sage (the accounts
>> software folk) say that their software will not work properly over a
>> network which uses these Realtek cards.
>
>Save yourself far more than the few dollars of false economy 
>and throw away
>your Realtek junk.  I had so many "strange" and "seemingly application
>level" problems just vanish when I put real 3Com/Intel/etc 
>network cards
>into my servers and workstations.
>
>The 8139, 8169, et al... all of them are junk.  I just spent a week
>diagnosing a strange packet loss issue with the 8169 (GigE) 
>interface which
>only manifested itself under pretty heavy loads in a difficult 
>to reproduce
>manner. It occurred often enough to break my application at 
>least twice a
>day, but I couldn't get it to fail predictably so I could 
>easily debug it. 
>
>After the usual wasted DAYS of swapping NICs, cables, 
>switches, and even
>machines...  I changed to an Intel network card, and all of my 
>problems were
>solved.
>
>Do yourself a favour: get rid of that junk.  The math just 
>doesn't work. 
>Cost delta of NIC?  Maybe $15-20 tops.  Cost your wasted time? 
> HUNDREDS of
>$$$, at least.
>
>=Malcom=
>
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