[TriLUG] NIC may be too old

[Mike M]

On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 04:13:42PM -0400, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> Well that depends entirely on if you plan on stuffing more than 10 
> Megabits of traffic through it.  :)  If it's the external interface 
> connected to your DSL/Cable/* router - it's likely that the other side 
> of the cable is only 10Mbit anyway, and probably limited beyond that to 
> at most 3Mbits, so anything more is wasted.  That 3com NIC is certainly 
> capable of shoveling it's rated capacity worth of data.

OK.  I'll keep it on the cable side. I've also caught it playing
possum under both Linux and now BSD.  It seems to deactivate if it
is not used immediately after booting up.  With a router though, this
condition seems highly improbable.  With a freshly loaded BSD and
a newbie user, it's a condition that's likely.
> 
> Aaron S. Joyner
> 
> PS - for those who are curious, "xl" is the driver for 3com nics in 
> *BSD, hence the name of the interface is xl0.

Thanks.  I do remember now seeing this:

xl*	at pci? dev ? function ?		# 3C9xx ethernet cards

It looks like a different prefix is used for other 3Com nics:

ep0	at pci? dev ? function ?		# 3C59x ethernet cards
ep*	at pci? dev ? function ?		# 3C59x ethernet cards

(http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/RAMDISK?rev=HEAD)
> 
> Mike M wrote:
> 
> >On recently installed BSD system I found my NIC only does
> >10BaseT.  It is pretty old.  Should I ditch this interface?
> >
> >bsd1# ifconfig -m xl0
> >xl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
> >       address: 00:60:08:cf:6b:69
> >       media: Ethernet 10baseT (10baseT half-duplex)
> >       supported media:
> >               media 10baseT
> >               media 10baseT mediaopt half-duplex
> >		media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
> >	        media 10base5 
> >		media 10base2
> >       inet 192.168.1.101 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
> >       inet6 fe80::260:8ff:fecf:6b69%xl0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
> > 

-- 
Mike

Moving forward in pushing back the envelope of the corporate paradigm.