[realtek] RE: network drops out

[Maurice Hilarius]

With regards to your message at 06:38 AM 6/26/02, Kris Thielemans. Where 
you stated:

>With this patched version installed, my system locked up at the first ftp
>(get) attempt. I then disabled Edgar Toerning's patch. After this, the
>behaviour resorted to the previously mentioned mess: after doing some ftps,
>the network card/driver seems to pack up, and only gets going again after
>
>  ifconfig eth0 down
>  ifconfig eth0 172.16.20.2 broadcast 172.16.255.255 netmask 255.255.0.0
>  rcroute start

Hi Kris.
We tried for quite a while to get the Realteks to work continuously under 
load and finally gave up, as have many others. The reason we were 
interested is they were installed on some motherboards, so we had little 
choice.
After much wasted effort we came to the conclusion that while these may 
suitable for  use with a cable modem and WinME, they are not stable enough 
under load to use for anything serious.
We tried a number of variants, drivers, etc. Seemingly worked well, but 
under heavy enough traffic always stalled sooner or later.

Conclusion: Get a real NIC.
  3C905 and EtherExpress are both reasonably priced and work.
SMC can be pretty good too.


With our best regards,

Maurice W. Hilarius       Telephone: 01-780-456-9771
Hard Data Ltd.               FAX:       01-780-456-9772
11060 - 166 Avenue        mailto:maurice@harddata.com
Edmonton, AB, Canada      http://www.harddata.com/
    T5X 1Y3

2.3TB RAID5 NAS server - dual AthlonMP CPU, Linux, $10,995 CAD / $6850 USD