Hey John and list... I've talked to plenty of admins that swear by the realtek cards - I don't have them in any of my servers, but have replaced about three of them in my workstations over the past 6 months because they died (so suffice it to say that I'm not too excited about them).
Historically, I've used 3Com 3C905x, but recently started having problems with the 905C's in both BSD and NT boxes (after doing tons of research in the mailing list archives, I found tons of people who've had problems similar to mine using the 3C905x cards with the Cisco 3524xl switches I use.). SO I don't know if I can throw the blame solely on 3Com, but it has been well documented that 3Com and Cisco switches "don't play well together" :-) I've been switching them all to Intel Pro/100 cards (as suggested by those who had 3ComNIC/Cisco switch issues), and have had ZERO issues since then. FYI, I do run the Linksys cards in my workstations (only chipsets after 4.0, the earlier ones were really lousy), and have had no issues with those (can't see putting $60 into a workstation NIC, servers are a much different story, at least in my book) My $0.02, Tony Gray Intouch Comm. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of John Tolmachoff > Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 4:28 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Bad LAN cards (was: IMail is extremely ...) > > > Has anyone tried NIC based on the RealTek RTL8139 (A) chip? > > These are also branded by a few different companies: Aopen, HP, and some > others. > > We use these NIC all over, except for servers where we want to have the > WOL option. > > John Tolmachoff, Network Engineer > > 211 E. Imperial Hwy., Suite 106 > Fullerton, CA� 92835 > 714-578-7999, ext. 104 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > www.reliancesoft.com > � > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of R. Scott Perry > Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 12:41 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Bad LAN cards (was: iMail is extremely ...) > > > > > 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 > --- > Declude: Anti-virus, Anti-spam and Anti-hijacking solutions for > IMail. http://www.declude.com > > --- > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus > (http://www.declude.com)] > > > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > to be removed from this list. > > An Archive of this list is available at: > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > > > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > to be removed from this list. > > An Archive of this list is available at: > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > --- > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by http://www.intouchmi.com] > > --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by http://www.intouchmi.com] Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
