D-Link DFE-570TX 4port

[Franz Marini]

Hi,


On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Gunnar Lindholm wrote:

> Hello.
> Does anybody have any experience with these network cards?

On our cluster we use the DFE-570TX on the console/NFS/interface node
without any problem.
We have 1 of the 4 port connected to the university network and the other
three to the local network switch (a 3com SuperStack II 3300XM).
The other 16 nodes use normal 3com 3c905C-TX network adapters.

I suggest to use the latest Becker's driver 'cause at first (with the
driver shipped with RH 6.1) we were not able to properly see and configure
all the 4 ports. Installing the latest driver solved any problem. 

BTW, be carefull with autonegotiation, we had our card run with
half-duplex enabled and the switch in full-duplex mode for a couple of
days before noticing strange errs in /proc/dev/net... Further
investigation with tulip-diag let us find the problem. Forcing full-duplex
on the dlink solved the issue.

About using multiple NICs : (and I'm asking to the net gurus) at this time
we use the 3 ports connected to the switch in this way :

  port 1 is used for comms from ALL the nodes to the server and from the
server to nodes 1-5.
  port 2 for comms from the server to nodes 6-10
  and port 3 from the server to nodes 11-16

it works, but I don't think it's a really good solution... The question is
: is it possible to use the channel bonding capabilities to configure the
3 ports as one and use them with the port trunking facility of the
SuperStack II ?

Any help would be appreciated.

TIA, 

Franz




---------------------------------------------------------
Franz Marini
Sys Admin and Software Analyst,
Dept. of Physics, University of Milan, Italy.

"There's nothing wrong in M$oft that Linux can't cure..."

email : marini at pcmenelao.mi.infn.it
---------------------------------------------------------