[WBEL-users] Anyone Using Gigibit Ethernet with White Box?

[George Salt]

Thanks for the advice concerning switches.  For my
project, I'll probably stick with 100 Mbps ethernet
(all of my Pentium-3s have onboard 10/100 NICs)
however, I'm going to buy a good switch with
10/100/10000 "autosense" capability so that I can
upgrade in the future.

This is a very good forum - the people are friendly
and helpful.

Best regards,

~GS

--- "Kirby C. Bohling" <kbohling@birddog.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 02:07:53PM -0700, George
> Salt wrote:
> > Thanks for the input.  Initially, I was primarily
> > concerned with driver support for the gigabit
> cards;
> > however, that's a good point about the bandwidth
> > limitations in the PCI bus.
> > 
> > Basically, I'm putting together a small Beowulf
> > cluster with some older P3 machines.  This is a
> home
> > hobbyist/grad school project, not a serious
> production
> > system.  A marginal improvement in speed may not
> > justify the extra cost of gigabit cards.
> > 
> 
> 	Just a heads up, they say you can't take full
> advantage of a
> Gigabit card with anything slower then about 800Mhz.
>  I use Intel
> e1000's on a fairly regular basis.  Those appear to
> work okay.
> 
> 	I've got a couple of the low end $45 at CompUSA
> NetGear cards, I
> can't even tell you the model (I believe they only
> have 1 gigabit
> model).  They appear to work just fine.  
> 
> 	This is the output of the dmesg for the network
> card that is
> built into all of the IBM servers we use in
> production.  They are
> very, very fast, and have been very stable for us.
> 
> tg3.c:v1.2e4 (Feb 20, 2003)
> eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95703A30) rev 1002
> PHY(5703)] (PCIX:100MHz:64-bit) 10/100/1000BaseT
> Ethernet
> 
> 	No idea if you can buy them as a separate card at
> all.
> 
> 	The place where you really get bit on the
> networking end, is
> that a cheap switch can really affect your network. 
> So you might be
> leary of the lowend switches until you see some
> decent benchmarks
> out of them.  We had that problem with a cheap
> switch we picked up,
> it was a "store and forward" style.  So, while it
> was 1Gbit switch,
> it had a bit of latency, which lead to problems
> running NFS over it
> (NFS is fairly latency sensitive, you can have all
> the bandwidth in
> the world, but if it has a 100ms latency, it will
> suck performance
> wise).  We bought a better switch, and we saw
> serious performance
> improvements (Dell PowerConnect 5224, which is
> really an OEM'ed
> Cisco switch, but I don't know the Cisco model
> number).
> 
> 	That's something you might also want to contemplate
> with it.
> 
> 		Thanks,
> 			Kirby
> 
> 
> > Best regards,
> > 
> > ~GS
> > 
> > --- Pete Stevens <pete@ex-parrot.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, George Salt wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Greetings,
> > > >
> > > > Can anyone recommend a gigabit ethernet pci
> card
> > > that
> > > > works well with WBEL?  Any driver issues I
> should
> > > be
> > > > aware of?
> > > >
> > > > I know it's no longer an issue with 10/100
> > > ethernet,
> > > > but I want to check before I purchase some
> gigabit
> > > > cards (and hub), and most vendors (Netgear,
> for
> > > > example) don't say anything about linux
> support.
> > > > Thanks in advance for any advice.
> > > 
> > > I've two machines working fine with onboard
> Realtek
> > > cards,
> > > RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+, they're plugged into a
> CISCO
> > > 100Mbit switch.
> > > 
> > > An onboard Intel Corp. 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet
> > > Controller, works fine on a
> > > machine that's been hand patched up from Redhat
> 6.0
> > > to a 2.6.5 kernel, I've
> > > also used PCI Intel Pro Gbit desktop adapters
> which
> > > have all worked very well
> > > [although they're on Debian stable].
> > > 
> > > Personally I'd recommend the Intel PCI cards,
> they
> > > cost around 30GBP [$50 US]
> > > and just work.
> > > 
> > > The only thing I'd watch out for is if it's an
> old
> > > machine [e.g. a BP6 dual
> > > celeron] you can get stung because the PCI card
> spec
> > > changed to add an extra
> > > voltage - we can't put a Gbit card in our dual
> > > celeron which is a shame, we'll
> > > have to retire it instead.
> > > 
> > > Hope that helps.
> > > 
> > > Pete Stevens
> > > 
> > > --
> > > Pete Stevens
> > > pete@ex-parrot.com
> > > Virtual WBEL servers
> > > http://www.mythic-beasts.com/vds.html
> > > 
> > >       A fanatic is one who can't change his mind
> and
> > > won't change the subject.
> > >                                                 
>    
> > >       -- Winston Churchill
> > > 
> > 
> > 
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> 



		
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