Hello John ,
On Sun, 15 Feb 2009, John A. Kilpatrick wrote:
Has anyone had problems with using current Intel quad ethernet cards for
packet capture? As a proof-of-concept test we bought an Intel PWLA8494GT and
hooked it up to some Network Critical taps. There was a very strange issue
with corruption of the captured packets. The *only* issue (but it's a big
one) is that the source IP on some captured packets is munged. As far as I
can tell that's the *only* issue with the packet captures - no other data is
corrupted.
Oh, and to rule out other issues:
1. Corruption seen both when using network taps and when using a port
span/mirror (so it's not the taps).
2. Corruption *not* seen using the on-board broadcom nics of the test
host (so it's not the box).
So I'm pretty sure we narrowed it down to the card. We tried the card in
an indentical host and saw the same problems.
I thought it might be a driver issue - I tried both gentoo and FreeBSD (not
sure how different the drivers are) just to see if it mattered at all and it
didn't. Much googling didn't show this to be a known issue - just wondering
if anyone else has seen it? Other recommendations welcome - the next step
is, I suppose, a broadcom-based PCI-X card. (I've got some old pizza boxes
I'm trying to repurpose as network probes.)
Thanks,
John
Does this device provide 4 unique mac-addresses ? Reason for the
question is some old(I mean old) multiport cards presented a single mac-address
because the were driven by a single 'Switch chip' . Just a thought . I've been
looking a the Intel site gandering over the overview & have not seen anything to
relieve my concern . But one Hopes they have learned not to create themselves
such a problem .
Hth , JimL
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| James W. Laferriere | System Techniques | Give me VMS |
| Network&System Engineer | 2133 McCullam Ave | Give me Linux |
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