Very Computer

Thanks!

There are one or two rare ISA 100 Mb cards, listed in the Ethernet
HOWTO. One is the 3c515.  The ISA bus cannot handle 100 Mb worth of
traffic anyway so don't expect the full speed.  Why do you want to do
this? Do you have a 100 Mb only hub?

Quote:> Do you have a 100 Mb only hub?

I have some non-linux boxes that run high-traffic server apps (but low CPU
usage) that only take ISA as well.  I'd like to swap those cards out and let
them run at 100 and I'd like to get cards that in the future if I upgrade
the server computers I can take the ISA cards out and put them in the Linux
box.

Right now the Linux box is the gateway to the Internet over a 256K
connection, so the 10 M is not a problem.  But in the future, who knows how
fast my Internet will be?  Maybe I'd need (or could certainly use) the 100 M
connection speed.

Thanks for your help.

The answer to the original question is that there is no such thing as a
good ISA 100Mb card, but the 3c515 is about the "best" and works as well
in Linux as it does in anything else if not better. It is no trouble to
get working, and reliable IME, it just isn't fast.

Regards, Ian

PS I gave mine away, no idea where they are now so don't ask:)

--

Fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

james.knott.

Quote:

> Right now the Linux box is the gateway to the Internet over a 256K
> connection, so the 10 M is not a problem.  But in the future, who knows
> how
> fast my Internet will be?  Maybe I'd need (or could certainly use) the 100
> M connection speed.

> Thanks for your help.

Fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

james.knott.

Maybe you should just upgrade them directly to PCI bus computers. How
high can the traffic be if they are only using ISA 10Mb cards at the
moment?

|Right now the Linux box is the gateway to the Internet over a 256K
|connection, so the 10 M is not a problem.  But in the future, who knows how
|fast my Internet will be?  Maybe I'd need (or could certainly use) the 100 M
|connection speed.

I doubt if you'll need 100 Mb to the Internet, but again, just toss out
the 486 and go for a Pentium with a PCI bus. Even P100s and P200s are
disappearing species.

Quote:

> I doubt if you'll need 100 Mb to the Internet, but again, just toss out
> the 486 and go for a Pentium with a PCI bus. Even P100s and P200s are
> disappearing species.

When I FTP stuff from the 80586 to a P-II Xeon server with an Intel
EtherExpress Pro 10/100 (chipset 82557), I never get more than about 6MB/s.
Disks aren't issue, as the server has an ATA/100 drive that benchmarks at
around 30MB/s, and the client has a Seagate SCA drive hooked up to a
Fast/Narrow bus (unknown benchmark). FTP'ing stuff between the
aforementioned Xeon server and another normal P-II machine with an
SMC2-1211TX (100baseT-FX) results in throughputs of 9-10MB/s.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with poorly supported bus mastering,
interrupt handling, or what.

--

Quote:>|I have an old 486DX I'm running Linux on.  Can anyone recommend a good ISA
>|card that runs at 100 Mbps that works with Linux?

> There are one or two rare ISA 100 Mb cards, listed in the Ethernet
> HOWTO. One is the 3c515.  The ISA bus cannot handle 100 Mb worth of
> traffic anyway so don't expect the full speed.  Why do you want to do
> this? Do you have a 100 Mb only hub?

--

You try it. :-)

Hint: You cannot achieve the theoretical bandwidth.

Sure, but the point is that 100Mb PCI NICs are cheap and plentiful and
he can continue to use them with more powerful CPUs, and will certainly
be enough for his Internet connection, unless he's got a massive pipe,
while 100Mb ISA NICs are collectors items and may even cost more than a
motherboard replacement :-).

--

Fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

james.knott.

Also the bus has to handle more than just data in one direction to the NIC.  
For example, there are the acks that have to be handled.  Then the data has
to come from somewhere, such as a disk drive, which also takes bandwidth,
plus other things that the computer is doing, which also requires bandwidth
from the bus.  All in all, there's a lot of other traffic on the ISA bus,
which will prevent it from coming any where near that 8MB/s.

--

Fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

james.knott.

--

Fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

james.knott.