PowerMac 5400 as server/gateway?

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 9:25 AM +0200 6/5/02, =C5ke Svensson wrote:
>Checked in the old "Guru" from Newer Tech and it states that the 5400/120
>has PCI, but is there an available slot? If there is,  you could by a secon=
d
>NIC. Search this list for suitable one, although I can recommend a RTL8139
>NIC for a recent kernel.

It's a PCI based motherboard for sure, but I don't remember whether 
those all-in-one form factor Macs gave access to a slot.  If it does 
have a free slot, a PCI NIC is quite easy to add as you say.

I dunno about recommending RTL8139.  :)  They're very cheap, and 
Linux driver support is good, but from a hardware perspective they 
are easily the worst Ethernet chipset on the market.  They have 
design problems that force the driver to eat a lot more CPU than 
other NIC designs, and sometimes I've seen them cause bizarre 
networking problems that could only be cleared up by replacement with 
a better quality NIC.  You can get Tulip clones nearly as cheap, and 
they have a big leg up just by being based on DEC's excellent Tulip 
design.

(Unfortunately not all Tulip clone chips work out of the box on PPC. 
I know for sure that you won't get far with the ADMTek Comet, for 
example, because there is an endianness bug in the code which reads 
and writes its Ethernet MAC address registers.  Lite-On PNIC should 
be good, though.)

-- 
Tim Seufert