[Asterisk-Users] Lower cost router suitable for VOIP ?

[Chris Shaw]

> That's not my experience.  I don't remember any eepro100 driver
> lock-ups, and I have at least 1000 card-years of experience with them,
> ranging back from 2.0.x to 2.6.x.  We replaced all of our 3com cards
> due to driver problems (circa 1998), but the Intel cards Just Worked.
> We never noticed a CPU load problem, but we were only rarely concerned
> with CPU load, anyway.

Ok Way OT, I didn't mean to get into a religious debate, I like the Intel
cards, I have several of them and recommend them to my friends, etc...

Be that as it may... This was using these cards in a software bridge...
significantly more traffic than an ordinary end-to-end connection... Packets
destined for MANY different PCs are being passed through the card... It may
have been a combination of the bridging code and the NIC drivers that lead
to the instability problems I experienced...

> I've always been nervous about Tulip clones.  I have a half-dozen 21143
> boards at home that are great.

The tulip cards are awesome for the simple fact that they're hella old...
(yes that's the scientific reason!) The tulip design goes back to the old
DEC 21040 chips of the early-mid nineties (ahhh the good ol' days!) There
has been a lot of time to play with these chipsets and they are well
documented so pretty much all of their functions work well and there are no
surprises The problem with Intel/3Com/et. al. is that the open source
drivers either have to be reverse-engineered or the company has to be
open-source minded enough to share information... There are many
undocumented features in these kinds of drivers that just kinda work(tm)...

Again... I have no affiliation with one or the other, no religious
prefrences, no nothing... This is just what I've found using the cards...
YMMV!

-Chris