3c905b

[hondapants]

why is the 3c905b NIC frowned upon?

[dmorris]

its fine.
certain people, who shall remain nameless, hate them.
but in my experience they've always worked well in linux.

[hescominsoon]

the 905b's have a well deserved reputation for being unstable. Try one..if it works for you great. if you start seeing weirdness replace those nics before anything else.

[sky-knight]

The 905B does fine on windows, I used to carry them around with me as an emergency NIC for NT4.0.

The linux kernel module does strange things under load... For light use it is fine, but you'll have random arp issues as the card loads up. Then you get dropped packets... all sorts of random fun.

[hescominsoon]

i've had the 905b's go wonky even under windows.. They are a good emergency nic..but rely on them for long..

[hondapants]

thanks for the replies guys, i had one of these in and found a couple things happening
1. server error 500
2. dropped connections on the network
these seemed to happen intermittently
i wasnt sure what the issue was
i have since swapped it out and disabled the onboard nic for 2x broadcom 5701, thing now seem to have settled down

[hescominsoon]

actually i would use the broadcoms they are usually great nics..

[hondapants]

i found them on ebay for £6 ea thought it was a bit of a bargin

[sky-knight]

I don't care for the broadcoms only because of the way they handle the drivers. Intel's support is far more consistent. But now that Untangle themselves have taken it upon themselves to get those interfaces working... and I have no illusions that they did this for any kind of altruistic venture on our part... they did it to get those Dells of theirs to work.

Anyway, now that we have support for them, and Untangle has committed to keeping them online... Broadcom vs Intel, your choice, both good.

[Solignis]

Yeah I have been there with the 905b's. Like Sky-Knight was saying I had random issues with them.

But sadly I had way more problems with netgear NICs they were just all kinds of fun.

I use broadcomm NICs in my personal UT right now, they work pretty well. I used them since 6.0 so they are proven to me. Actually they compaq NC7770 NICs but they based on a Broadcomm chip which can be seem on the PCB.

Anyhow they work.

But I have the best luck with Intel, old, new Intel just works.