Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Wanted: Co-operative ethernet card

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Posted by S. Y. on

My standard admonition is for you to visit the Hardware Compatability List for your distribution and quit screwing around trying to get some moldy old ISA NIC to work. Here are two suggestions though:

Intel EtherExpress Pro 100+ (PILA8460) - 82557 chipset - About $50 OEM. Virtually all Linux distros support this card. It's used heavily as an onboard NIC and many other OSes (BSD, Win9x, WinNT, etc.) support this card. This is the only chipset that is flagged for compilation in a generic kernel tarball. People who don't want to pound their heads against a brick wall for half a day trying to get a $50 component to work will use this card.

Bay Networks NetGear FA301TX - uses the DEC tulip.o driver About $20 retail. You have to manually compile support into the kernel or insert the module yourself. Good for people who know what they're doing and want to save a couple of bucks.

If you're running an always-on web server, you don't need any of that wake-up on LAN/network management stuff. Just get the cheap OEM version of the appropriate card (although the NetGear card is so cheap, it's probably a waste of time/money looking for a place that even offers it OEM).