Onboard 3COM -- mine is screwed up

[imported_BikeDude]

Recently we got two sweet AMD K8V Deluxe based rigs with 1GB memory and Athlon64 3200+. A big step up from our three and a half year old P3s!

But, there's a fly in the ointment. After we upgraded, we're frequently disconnected from our LAN.

Normally I'd check my switch settings and so on, but in this case we noticed that we can reproduce this behaviour by simply debugging our application (which uses sockets). As our application's socket starts buffering up information (while execution is frozen in the debugger), the 3COM driver simply stops processing packages too... At this point I can't ping anything on the LAN, and even if I pull the cable nothing happens (as you know, Windows should alert me of the missing cable immediately).

I run Windows 2003 Server, my co-worker has Windows XP. I strongly suspect the problem will go away as soon as we install Intel NICs...

In the meantime -- any suggestions? Am I the only one who've noticed this?

 

[johnjkr1]

Do you have the latest 3com drivers? Previous versions of the drivers can cause problems.

 

[imported_BikeDude]

I checked asus.com.tw's website a couple of weeks ago, but found none.

Does the 3Com standard driver set support the 3C940 chip? (IIRC they used to have a set of drivers that supported a whole bunch of 3Com chips)

 

[amdskip]

Put a nic in, end of problems. I do not like onboard nics. At school, all of our lab machines have onboard but we put nics in them all.

 

[johnjkr1]

I think the 3com driver package supports a whole bunch of nic's, download it ,read the readme and see if yours in one of them

 

[imported_BikeDude]

Well... The only new driver package I found was "996_cd_21.exe".

Looking at the inf files, "3Com 3C940 Gigabit LOM" was actually mentioned, but when I tried updating the driver from device manager it failed to find anything there. I guess ASUS might've changed the device ID, but I'd be surprised if that was the case.

There was also an autorun thing there (a garish menu with annoying sounds) which gave me the option of updating my drivers. It said it did, but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure my driver version remained the same. (the problem persists)

BTW: That file was 50MB+... Yikes.

 

[imported_BikeDude]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Put a nic in, end of problems. I do not like onboard nics. At school, all of our lab machines have onboard but we put nics in them all.

Hmm... If those motherboards were using Intel CSA, that would truly be an extremely daft thing to do...

The PCI bus is no place for a gigabit controller. Unfortunately all motherboards for AMD CPUs puts the onboard ethernet controller on the PCI bus AFAIK. The new nForce being the notable exception. (and the next VIA chip too I guess)

I'll probably switch to a Intel NIC eventually, but I'd rather solve this issue first.

 

[huesmann]

Did you try manually updating the driver, rather than letting Windows do it for you?

 

[imported_BikeDude]

I clicked "Update driver" and pointed it at the directory containing the .inf file. I don't know of a more manual way of doing things...

I guess I could check both .inf files and see what the actual hardware ID differences are.