Re: Large scale transparent proxying

Clifton Royston wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 07:29:14AM +0100, Simon Rainey wrote:
> > We're suffering from poor throughput on loaded boxes when using the Intel
> > EtherExpress 10/100 under Linux. There seem to be other problems with that
> > NIC too, such as lockups in the presence of multicast traffic. I'm about to
> > replace all the Intel EtherExpress 10/100 NICs with a NIC based on the DEC
> > Tulip, which appears to perform well under Linux.
>
> I believe that's specific to the Linux drivers. *BSD (BSD/OS, FreeBSD,
> NetBSD) systems seem to have no trouble with the EtherExpress cards.

There are a few dozen different models/revisions of Intel EtherExpress's
spanning a half dozen chipsets and three buses :)

Several of the cards have hardware problems with the multicast filter. They
would shut down and stop responding or worse.

Both Linux and *BSD's compensate for this, but there are some versions which
are still a bit flakey.

I personally have several of the buggy eepro's:

eth0: OEM i82557/i82558 10/100 Ethernet at 0xdf00, 00:A0:C9:E1:F5:E1, IRQ 17.
      Board assembly 697680-001, Physical connectors present: RJ45
      Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
      General self-test: passed.
      Serial sub-system self-test: passed.
      Internal registers self-test: passed.
      ROM checksum self-test: passed (0x24c9f043).
      Receiver lock-up workaround activated.

But they all work just fine under Linux w/ the standard drivers. Multicasting
doesn't appear to break it, but it did at one point in time.

I find it amazing that a company as big as Intel can't make a working 10/100
ethernet card and call it something other than "EtherExpress" since it's
basically impossible to tell the difference between a broken eepro100 and a
working one from the box :)

The same goes for 3com, the vortex/boomerang ethernet drivers are so full of
workarounds it's not funny.

Sigh,

Jordan

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Jordan Mendelson     : http://jordy.wserv.com
Web Services, Inc.   : http://www.wserv.com