-Environment-

• Dell Latitude CPi D300XT
• 3CCFE575BT-D NIC (3c575)
• Fedora Core 1 (same symptoms persist in Debian Stable)

-Symptoms-

• NIC properly detected in all logs and reports known to me (a linux newb)
• Acquires an IP address via DHCP as expected
• Can communicate via http, ssh, telnet, ftp, ping, etc.
• Completely stops sending/recieving packets after approx. 10-20 sec. of operation.

Now for the details:
I installed Debian via CD-Rom on this system first. The install worked fine, including network/pcmcia configuration, and the request of a DHCP address. Yet, later, I found the machine couldn't communicate on the network. Merely re-inserting the card and requesting a new IP via "dhclient" remedied this mess, as I hopped onto mozilla and connected to debian.org. I was able to read the page, but it quit again mid-download. It was suggested that I try to assure that I could communicate on all ports. So by removing and reinserting the card during a process of pinging, ftping, etc. I was able to determine that as long as the card was operational, it was performing normally.

Under the impression that perhaps Debian Stable just didn't have new enough packages, and not wanting to bother with updating past Sarge (if it seemed necessary) I installed Fedora Core 1 with the same success. Everything works except the NIC (and sound, but I hardly care about that). I've been beating my head against the wall with this. It's not my router, or ISP or other network related symptom we all know would be too easy a solution anyways. It's not the dongle (tried a different one). It's not the hardware itself (I used the exact same card model, from my friend's exact same laptop model which has supported the NIC without problems under FreeBSD).

It was suggested that, perhaps, kudzu was interfering after cardmgr/hotplug configured the device, so kudzu is now disabled...

I've tried a lot of things. I still think the problem lies somewhere within the cardmgr/hotplug realm, but I don't know nearly enough about these programs to begin troubleshooting them. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

No suggestions? For anything? People are reading this and no program, manual, how-to, or even vaguely related mailing list post pops into their head?

Hello there. I see you have stumbled upon the 3c575-cards-suck-in-slower-computers-but-nobody-ever-fixes-the-problem problem.

I feel your pain, I have been there.

First off, open up an xshell and tail kernel log or the messages log. You may need to be root to do this - tail -f /var/log/kern.log or tail -f /var/log/messages. Then use your computer as usual. You will probably see errors "TX ring full" errors when the card stops sending and receiving packets.

A couple of interesting observations I have done:

1. It doesn't seem to matter what driver you are using. Both the pcmcia-cs version, called 3c575_cs if I remember correctly, and the in-kernel 3c59x driver display the same problem.

2. The error seems related to system speed:

• On my Latitude CPi 300XT the driver will fail when transferring over the LAN at high speed or if I get unusually good downloading speeds from the Internet.
• On my old Thinkpad 760XD (Pentium MMX 166MHz) the card will fail even when pinging a host on the LAN.
• On my newer Thinkpad 600E (Pentium2 366MHz) the card will also fail, but only when doing LAN transfers at 1.1MB/s (10Mbit) or faster)
• On a borrowed Dell 1000MHz laptop the card didn't fail me once.

I have been in contact with pcmcia-cs developers a couple of times but they only say "Sorry we can't test that, send us the hardware and we'll check it out". I have also written a public call to arms on the pcmcia-cs SourceForge forums, but not one responded although there are plenty of complainers there.

I ended up getting a cheap D-Link DFE-670-TXD which, being a 16bit card, only provides 10Mbit performance but it has never once given me any headache with any distribution.


Håkan

Thanks a lot, Håkan.

Guess I have little choice but to acquire another card, but at least I dont have to worry about finding out it was a useless purchase later...

Followup/Resolution:
I'm afraid there is no way around this. As Håkan said, the support just isn't there. I had originally reserved myself to buying a new network card, but decided to give FreeBSD a try before I did it. This NIC is supported flawlessly in FreeBSD and my final hang-up (sound) is well on its way to being taken care of as well. If you're trying to run linux on a computer that isn't fast enough to support this NIC, you might just give FreeBSD a try as I did. I've found FreeBSD to be much faster than debian/fedora. I intend to run this OS on this hardware for the rest of its life...

Good information onu, thanks a lot. When I originally was eyeing FreeBSD a couple of years ago as a solution to my problems with this network card it wasn't supported at all, and my experience with OpenBSD (which did support the card) was not very fruitful. Perhaps I should dig up that old Dell and see if I can get it running as a development web server or something.


Håkan

Well feel free to talk to me if you do. I assume your hardware is roughly similar to mine, and since I've been away from home and thus haven't had a chance to connect to the net and grab some more productive packages all I've been doing is tweaking FreeBSD to support the hardware I'm interested in as best as possible.

I'm no linux/bsd expert but I've been getting a lot of experience in the last week.

E-mail's probably the best way to contact me lately, add my username to corrosivetruths.org if you want to talk.