erg, crappy netcard

nightice

In my server is a Linksys Network Everywhere NC100 v2.1. Whenever I try to use a graphical browser, the system compeltely locks up. I'm lucky to even get said graphical browser - the comp will often lock up during file downloads. It doesn't matter which browser, it will always happen. This has occured on Windows 9x, 2000, and XP. The card doesn't install on NT4 - even though drivers are provided. The Event Viewer says that "a device attached to the system is not functioning." Under Linux, it's similar - but only with graphical browsers. Anything on the command line (elinks, ftp) works flawlessly at surfing the web and downloading files. So, I'll just guess it's best to replace the card. I'm thinking a 3Com or Intel card.

nightice

Heh, I was installing Red Hat 8 earlier - during installation, you're asked to select a firewall security level, I chose "High". lsmod afterwards didn't show tulip. LOL

JackTheStripper

Aren't you some Linux zealot? What are you doing with Redhat :?

nightice

Experimenting, of course. For actual stuff I would use Slackware.

I wouldn't call myself a zealot.

nightice

I was looking at the FreeBSD man pages and found this very interesting bit. My card uses an AN985. Could it explain my issues?

The ADMtek AL981 chip (and possibly the AN985 as well) has been observed to sometimes wedge on transmit: this appears to happen when the driver queues a sequence of frames which cause it to wrap from the end of the transmit descriptor ring back to the beginning. The dc driver attempts to avoid this condition by not queuing any frames past the end of the transmit ring during a single invocation of the dc_start() routine. This workaround has a negligible impact on transmit performance.

nightice

So...it turns out that the BIOS in that PC is also absolute crap...I was advised to turn "Plug and Play OS" on (it was), but turning it *off* did the trick. At least for FreeBSD. I'll try Windows 2000 or summat next and see if I get any different results.