[rescue] Small Cheap Linux Board??

[Nadine Miller]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 10:43 PM, Charles Monett wrote:

> Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>> I wonder how the Supermicro Atom X7SLA-H MB would have fared:
>>
>> Mfg link:
http://supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/945/X7SLA.cfm?typ=H
>>
>> Newegg link:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182205&Tpk=x7sla-h
>>
>> It has the dual core 330 Atom CPU with two on-board Realtek Gigabit
>> ports, a PCI slot and two PCI-Express slots, on 8x and one 4x slot in
>> a slightly larger form factor... It runs about $50 more than the
>> D945GCLF2 ($139 vs $89).
>>
> Any word on the throughput of those Realtek chips?  They aren't known for
making Ethernet chipsets that hold up well to lots of traffic IIRC.

Hit or miss, IME.  I have 2 Gigabyte boards, different models, same Realtek
chipsets (though I am not sure of the revision--haven't bothered to get a
magnifying glass out).  One of the board drops link about once per day under
Solaris 10 (this is my NAS which also runs utorrent). Under Solaris 10, the
other board's Realtek NIC would plumb, and claim to be talking to the network,
but packets would go nowhere.  Under OS X, this second board is fine, but I
don't put sustained network load on it like I do the NAS--a few gigs back and
forth to the NAS or other machines in the house is all it does.

Everything I've read in the Solaris/OpenSolaris forums is the only solid
"consumer grade" NIC is the Intel desktop card, and it's a pricey devil
compared to everything else.  I bought one since I noticed the daily drops,
just haven't taken the downtime to install it.