Jacob Yocom-Piatt wrote: > i am planning on grabbing some PXE capable NICs in the next few days and would > like to know if any particular cards are better than others. in the vein of > intel being crappy, i am actively avoiding any intel-based chipsets. > > i'm looking for something cheap and reliable, the 3com 3c905c pops up near the > top of the list on froogle:
I have a lot of old 3c905B and 3c905C cards with PXE boot ROMs on them. None of them work with OpenBSD's PXE booting. HOWEVER, I suspect it is just an issue of the age of the ROMs on these things (they all came out of the same batch of computers which are about six or seven years old now)... 3Com also has a boot floppy which will initiate a PXE boot from a machine with almost any ISA or PCI 3Com NIC in it (and supposedly PCMCIA, as well), and that works fine with OpenBSD (finding it on their website may be a challenge), so I think they understand how to do PXE now. However, if you are purchasing surplus cards...you might end up with the old ones. I have never found a flash update for the 3Com 3c905 cards I have on 3Com's website (may not be flash devices, of course). The older Intel PXE cards I have tried had problems similar to the 3Com cards, but they could be flashed with updates (for the most part...there appeared to be some that the update utility refused to touch, based on what was already in the ROM). Lesson there /might/ be: old PXE stuff is unreliable, new stuff is better. If you aren't sure how old it is, get something that can be updated. Nick.
