Siju George wrote: > Hi all, > > Could someone please suggest me a good 4 port NIC ( I mean I will be > able to use it in the same way as I use 4 NICs but it will only > consume only 1 PCI slot) for OpenBSD 3.7?? > > Not a Gigabit one please > > Sorry vetrans, I am a little behind in hardware part :-( but sure I > am catching up :-) > > And if somebody wants me to define what I mean by "good" then > > good = nice perfomance i.e one that will not give me the error the > current NIC gives me > > " dc0: watchdog timeout "
yikes. Some (all?) of the best quad-port 10/100 NICs are based on Intel 21143 dc(4) chips. There are some cheap dc(4) chips out there which work poorly. However, I'm not aware of anyone making a quad-port cheap-dc(4) card -- the ones I have seen were all 21143-based. That's not to say someone didn't make one, but I'm not aware of one. You didn't specify the card you have, or provide a dmesg of the machine giving you this error...both would have been interesting. IF you have a quad-21143-based card, stop looking for a new NIC, you have the best available (unless someone made a stinker I'm not aware of). Look for your problem elsewhere. I've used a number of those 21143 quad-cards, one machine (of all the ones I've used) didn't like the card, and I *think* gave the same error you are getting. I ended up beating on some BIOS configuration settings, and was able to get the card to work properly (this message comes to you via that card). I've also seen some very old machines which don't seem to like PCI-PCI bridges on the PCI bus, in my experience, these were Pentium and before, the Pentium MX machines I've tried work fine, though my line there is very imprecise, I'm sure there are exceptions on both sides. As I recall, the symptoms I saw on these older machines was one port might work well, others poorly or not at all. IF I am right about this being a PCI-PCI bridge issue on these old machines, it is likely you will have the same problem on any quad-card. It is probably cheaper to get an old machine which DOES support the quad card you have than to get another quad card which turns out to have a similar problem... Nick.
