> > Netgear cards in servers?!? Noooooooooooo
> > it is wise to spend the extra cash on quality nic cards
>:( i learnt that the hard way
FYI, we have quite a bit of experience with "less well known" LAN
cards. Despite using Linksys for years without problems (ISA versions, I
believe), they no longer are good. It is VERY important to use a decent
LAN card on a server. Here's a rundown of several of the more common ones:
3com: Great. Everything says these are great, I haven't heard of any
problems.
Netgear: Do not use. Worked great for us for several months, then died,
due to a problem with the drivers (it was giving BSOD's all of a sudden; we
replaced with an identical Netgear card, and they continued; reinstalling
the drivers didn't help).
Linksys: Never use these on a server. They have a known critical flaw
(they will cause the server to crash during POP3 transfers; many people
have experienced this).
SOHOWare: Do not use. Ours had a problem where it would corrupt one byte
occasionally in packets, causing TCP/IP checksums to fail, so that many
files could not be downloaded, etc. A packet sniffer on two machines
proved that the SOHOWare card was altering the byte.
D-Link: A cheap consumer LAN card, but it's the one handling our Internet
connection right now, because we got stuck when the Neatgear conked out,
and this has been working fine since.
We've got some Intel and Belkins as backups that we don't have any
experience with yet. We would have just bought some 3coms but never found
them when we needed them! Note these are experiences that we had with
these cards; your mileage may vary.
-Scott
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