[NTLUG:Discuss] Router or switch?

Greg Edwards greg at nas-inet.com
Tue May 6 14:01:32 CDT 2003


Joel Sinor wrote:
> I have decided to avoid in future both the nforce2 and the built in ati
> as both have various linux issues.  I forget the one I saw but it had
> firewire, usb2.0, 10/100/1000enet built in, 8x agp and no built in sound
> or video.  It was $160 like all the really decent athlon XP mobos and
> supported DDR400 RAM (3GB IIRC) and up to athlon XP 2800+
> 
> Come to think of it, looking on Asus site, it looks like I may have been
> wrong about the audio, as this guy
> (http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socketa/a7n8x/overview.htm) is the most
> likely suspect...
> 

That's the board I've got, non deluxe version.  For the most part it 
works but is unstable.  From everything I've found the only real 
stability issue that should be causing me problems is UDMA support in 
the kernel for the chipset.  Alan Cox included a patch in the 2.4.21 
pre-5 (or 4) source tree that resolves this issue.  It will lockup from 
time to time and seems to be at it's worst when lots of graphics or java 
are involved.  The worst apps seem to be VMWare (with win98 running 
Quicken as the worst), mozilla (with java enabled sites), and games.

I found a long how-too type writeup that explains all of the tweaks 
necessary to get this board up with all of the bells and whistles 
running RH.  Nothing real fancy but the number of packages and size of 
the downloads needed to get it done is a PITA.

Also if you get this board, an ATI AGP video card (like Radeon) will not 
work.  It seems that NVidia and ATI don't like each other.  I've read 
that this issue may not get fixed, but the ATI PCI cards are fine.

I've got the AMD XP2200+, GForce2 Ti4800SE, Mandrake 9.0, onboard sound 
and onboard NIC, with 512M running.  As a workstation it is impressive. 
  I'll be building one as a server in my farm (without the fancy video) 
and I can't wait to see what it does there.

The word I've heard is that Mandrake 9.1 has incorporated everything 
necessary to get the board up and running out of the box.  They were 
suppose to start shipping the end of Apr and since my time is very 
limited I just decided to wait.

-- 
Greg Edwards
New Age Software, Inc. - http://www.nas-inet.com
======================================================
Galactic Outlaw        - http://goutlaw.nas-inet.com
   The ultimate cyberspace adventure!




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