[lug] Network cards?

[Nate Duehr]

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:20 -0700, "Lori Reed"
<lorireed at lightning-rose.com> wrote:
> I need a couple of 10/100/1000 PCI NICs.
> 
> Anything in particular I should get or avoid?
> 
> If it matters, I'm running Kubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24, but I might be 
> persuaded to upgrade to Kubuntu 9.10
> 
> TIA,
> Lori

The "gold standard" for servers has always been Intel "Pro" chipsets,
and their Linux support has always been "good". (I had network
performance problems with an early version of the Free driver, but that
got straightened out years ago.)

Also, if you have ANY thoughts of someday moving to a VmWare esx type
environment where the VmWare micro-kernel runs directly on the hardware,
only a very few NIC's are supported by their "kernel".  Intel is again,
on that list.  

I've seen performance problems on both Linux and Windows from Realtek
hardware.  I'd avoid those cheapie cards.  They're fine (and built in on
a lot of motherboards) for home use, but I always stuck an Intel card in
anything I really cared about performance on, when I worked in the
datacenter environment.  The $50 (back then, no idea what they are now)
for the Intel Pro 10/100's (also back then... haven't really used their
Gig stuff) was well worth knowing it would "just work" during bare-metal
reloads, etc.  

I always made sure whatever sub-chipset I was buying a "built-in" module
for a number of distros (back when ISA cards were still popular, some
distros included some cards, others didn't), and that the card would
auto-detect during configuration so I could kickstart/otherwise
slipstream server builds and walk away.  (Nowadays, I'd be doing that
OVER the network and I'd want a card that would Net boot properly.)

One way I've seen of "deciding" on this front is by looking at hardware
compatibility lists for the OS you want to use, and also OTHER OS's. 
Obviously I don't mean Windows here... but things like OpenBSD/FreeBSD
and/or things like VMWare's "kernel".  If you see a card on EVERYONE's
list... it's either because the manufacturer is GOOD about not hiding
their hardware implementation, or enough people REALLY wanted that
hardware... which tells you something.

If this is for a server, I think it's probably hard to go wrong with
Intel.  But perhaps you should wait until others comment too... Like I
said, haven't done much with their Gig offerings, and don't know if
they're still relatively "non-evil" about having appropriate
drivers/information to write drivers available to the Linux kernel
folks.

--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com