>> Telnet performance is spasmodic. There are lots of pregnant pauses as if some
>> very slow timer is flushing whatever outstanding data is "in flight" in the
>> connection. Ping shows that each packet appears to take exactly 1 second
>> longer than it should, but it's not clear whether the delay is during
>> transmit, receive, or both.
>I have a REALTEK card (that I bought at Fry's last summer).  It behaves
>as you describe, but I can get it to work by doing `ifconfig down'
>followed by `ifconfig up' on the interface.  The problematic behaviour
>doesn't always show up, sometimes it works.  Once it works it seems to
>behave well.

I finally had a chance to look at all this again tonight.

Your 'ifconfig method' works great on the card in my i386 machine. Yay!!

MORE SUCCESS!!  Though strange. I borrowed a LinkSys card from work (has a
WinBond chip on it) and tried that in both the i386 and arm32 machines.
It worked fine but had a MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00:00 so the router
would let it ping out but not telnet.

THEN, when I put the el-cheapo RealTek 8029 cards back in, they worked,
although I seem to consistently have to use the ifconfig trick on i386
-- but never on arm32 (perhaps because it is much closer to -current,
the i386 still runs 1.3.2+ATAPI).

Things are working so well, in fact, that the CATS firmware recognizes ne0
on bootup and lists it as a possible boot device.

This leaves me wondering if there is some PCI state saved on the motherboard
somewhere that was altered by the use of the LinkSys card, such that it would
now work with the cheapie RealTek.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com