Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 20:02:20 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu> To: Stein Morten Sandbech <stein@ife.no> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, stein@wopr.ife.no Subject: Re: FreeBSD at war with Win95 over 3Com 900XL ... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980303195713.21429J-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <34FBE6B2.28507F26@ife.no>
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On Tue, 3 Mar 1998, Stein Morten Sandbech wrote: > Initially I set up the 3Com 900 XL Combo card (vx0) in dos with the 3Com > utility, selecting > 10base2 (BNC), not "Auto Select" which is default. All is as well as > expected with the 900XL > under UNIX. This is what we want you to do. > However, rebooting with Win95 gives an incredibly sluggish machine, > taking about 2 minutes booting and starting the MS-Office shotcut bar!! > Before configuring the vx0 in FreeBSD it booted in fractions of a > second! After some trial and error I concluded that the Win95 900XL > driver must be brain-dead, I can't set 10base2. It accepts just "auto > select". Does a cold boot do anything? > Consequently I proceeded to set FreeBSD to select 10base2 with the > "link1" option in "/etc/rc.conf" as follows: > ifconfig_vx0="inet <ip-address> netmask <mask> LINK1" > and it works like a dream. > However, when I then proceed to reboot Win95 it still is sluggish, and > it seem to me that FreeBSD 900XL driver has set the card to 10base2 > again! Setting the card to "auto select" again and another reboot fixes > the problem until FreeBSD is booted and the Win95 hangs again > thereafter... That is what the link flags do -- they set the media type. `Auto select' is unpredicatble, especially with BNC media since there is no good way to `detect' BNC connections like there is for UTP. I guess the question is why Windoze is having trouble -- is it having to continually redetect the media type, resource conflict, ??? > Well, do anyone have a solution to this problem? Use a better card? :-/ The 3c900 has a *very* small amount of buffer space, enough that NFS packets get chopped up, severely hurting performance. I'm trying to rid ResNet of these cards so we can use the Dayna Digital-based cards, which are cheaper and perform ten times better. > Methinks I'm going to change to an old 3Com Etherlink II/16, at last it > runns OK with both > FreeBSD and Win95! (The problem is that there will be arriving a > truckload of these machines > with 900XL in a week or two, so a solution based on 900XL would be > preferred :-) Note this warning: > hilbert /kernel: vx0 <3COM 3C900 Etherlink XL PCI> rev 0 int a irq 10 on > pci0:13 > hilbert /kernel: utp/aui/bnc[*aui*]: disable 'auto select' with DOS > util! address 00:60:08:e7:ef:af Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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