problems with 3com and intel 100MB cards

[Marcin Kaczmarski]

> On Wed, 2002-10-09 at 10:37, Marcin Kaczmarski wrote:
> > I got the information from him that 3com and
> > intel cards are very unreliable , they cannot bear extremely high
> > network load. So are these cards only well suited for throwing them away
> > to the basket? 
> 
> This is not my experience, nor the experience of anybody I know. Sure
> low cost 3com cards aren't terribly good, but they are still better than
> almost all other low cost NIC's. Intel cards have always worked like a
> champ for me. Many server boards have eepro's (and 3com's, for that
> matter) for their builtin NICs and I would find it hard to believe that
> junk NIC chipsets would have made it through the rigorous qualification
> process for so many manufacturers of high-end motherboards.
> 
> I'm sure Don has a lot clearer big picture about NIC's than I do.
> 
> 	-Dean
> 

Hello,

It is a proven fact that happened at some University in Germany that the
newly bought super linux alpha dual cluster with 3com NIC ( I do not
know the model of these cards in this case) simply failed to operate
while trying to run very demanding scientifical calculations in material
science just because of cards. After replacing them with 3 year old dec
tulip cards everything gone fantastic.  I am highly convinced that a
server NIC which runs excellently in servers may be really absolutely
not suitable for cluster that runs calculations, because you cannot
compare the network load that you have on servers with the network load
that appears while running in cluster, in case of cluster it is very
very bigger. I`m sure of that. We had another reports in cpmd mailing
lists in September about linux 10 dual alpha cluster with 3com cards
that hangs calculations. I do not believe that they have low price 3com
cards in such a cluster.

kind regards
Marcin Kaczmarski