Who now

[Nigel Metheringham]

Just to add our position....

We have been using Kingston KNE40BTs then KNE100TX cards for a good time 
now with no problems other than when one of the Digital chip subversions 
broke things.

They were good cards, reliable and well priced.

However following the latest set of stuff from Kingston we will use their 
cards no long - especially for 100BaseT.

Kingston change the card design too regularly - both the Digital ASIC core 
and the support.  This makes them inconsistant.

Of the recent batch we are getting something around 10% or higher of 
failures.  Some are DOAs.  The majority of failures break after around 2 
days or less service (transceiver appears to fail).

Added to this, recent KNE100TX do not work well at 100BaseT - it appears 
that they have much lower noise tolerance and even with properly specified 
*good* cabling, short runs and a direct link into Cisco switches, the 
packet loss is appreciable.   TLAN based cards (Compaq internal network 
interfaces) give flawless results on the same wire.

We are not confident in the KNE110 series cards using a non-digitial ASIC 
core with some interesting characteristics (first attempt blasted packets 
continuously onto the network on boot-up, a move to the then most recent 
Tulip driver made it mostly work).  The obvious cost cutting on the card 
leads us to expect these to also be unstable.

So we are currently looking for alternatives that work well and give us a 
warm and fuzzy but reliable feeling.

	Nigel.


-- 
[ Nigel.Metheringham@theplanet.net   -  Systems Software Engineer ]
[ Tel : +44 113 207 6112                   Fax : +44 113 234 6065 ]
[      Real life is but a pale imitation of a Dilbert strip       ]