SUMMARY: third party fast ethernet card

Dear Friends,

Thanks to all how responded with usefull suggestions (good job!)
and to all who are on vacations (yeah, summer is coming --> out of office).

Most people suggested to buy second hand SUN approved card on e-bay,
but it is not easy to do it from Central Europe and for university ...

Few suggested to look at :

http://garrett.damore.org/software/ethernet/index.shtml

where one can find tested Solaris Sprac drivers for cheaper adapters.
Actualy I learned from our net admins, that they use alraedy one such
card (Linsys 100TX) with afe driver in few Ultra 10 Sparc machines.

So I'll try to go this way and in case of bad luck, I'll try to find
second hand SUN adapter.

Kind regards,

GB.

P.S.1 Have a nice weekend
P.S.2 Full anonymous summary follows:

########0 Original query
I need to add second fast ethernet network adapter to my
V880 Solaris 9 machine. (yeah, it has optical 1000MB and
one 100MB fast ethernet already but I have no appropriate
switch to attach optical adapter). So I'm looking
for cheap and working third party PCI-to-fast-ethernet (100MB)
card. Does anybody tested any non-SUN adapter (aka PC) priced
in a range 50-100 USD? Any troubles?
                                                                                                              
P.S. It may be 10/100/1000 adapter if works correctly at 100MB speed
    (the speed of switch) and is not too expensive.
 
          ANSWERS

#######1
In practice you will find very few are supported for SPARC/Solaris. Your
best bet is to get on ebay and grab a second hand QFE card. There are plenty 
on there for the money you are planning to spend.

#######2
Try http://garrett.damore.org/software/ethernet/ --this website
contains the drivers for PC NIC that works in SPARC as well.
(Linksys, SMC, CNET, etc.)

######3
Your best bet is to get a Sun approved card from one of the many
websites that sell cut price Sun kit.

######4
The problem is TP pci cards don't have Solaris drivers,
nor do they have openboot friendly microcode.   For
sparc boxes, you either get used Sun from someplace
like instockinc.com or dmgi.net, or you get one of the
Sun friendly TP cards listed at
  .http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/NIC.html

######5
try http://garrett.damore.org/software/ethernet/index.shtml for a possible
driver to some common cards.
or if you want a real sun card, try ebay. It will save you time over using
a non-sun card/driver.  sysKonnect makes a good  and okay priced
GigE card that has sun support.

######6
If you have a sparc, buy a used sun ethernet card off of ebay.
                                                                                                              
######7
 I bought a SUN quad fast-ethernet card in eBay (80$).
 You can try with anysystem.com too.

######8
There is a third party ethernet driver available, but to be honest with
such a system, I would suggest a second user X1033A, we sell them for
only 100 UK Pounds (approx $170) in the UK.

######9
Have a look at,
                                                                                                              
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/
                                                                                                              
This guy has SparcSolaris NIC drivers for a variety of
cheapo-generic-PC-NICs which build well on sparc/solaris, and actually
work (from our testing here, anyhow).

ie, we've got a realtek nic in a testing blade100 system (for instance)
and it seems to work just fine.  Clearly, purists will suggest that a $5
NIC in a lovely expensive sparc box is obscene, and this may be true,
but then again not necessairly for the reasons they may think initially? :-)
                                                                                                              
Other options I can recommend, we've got "SysKonnect" Gig-ether NICs in
a few production servers, e450, e250, and also Solaris/X86 (it is 64-bit
PCI card, but would work on 32-bit slots IF required, ugh). Performance
is superb, and the price was very reasonable (approx $100-150 USD?) when
compared to Sun-rebadged gig-ether NICs.

######Over
BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE 
EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT EoT
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers