Hardware reccomendations

Mike dugan at libwais.sonoma.edu
Tue Nov 2 23:03:29 PST 1999


Instead of me just saying, "me too" quickly and being annoying, I will
make my, "me too" longer and more verbose:

# response --extra-verbose-but-not-as-verbose-as-could-be

The 3COM Ethernet cards seems to offer the most consistant support across
many vendor platforms in the event you evenr decide to run another
alternative OS. (3C905 and 3C509 cards are *very* common, and most modern
x86 OS support these cards.

There are occasional problems with the Intel EtherExpress Ethernet cards
when being used with netatalk and netatalk+asun. There were problems with
enablig the multicast modes on the card being set to promiscuous mode for
multiple addresses. Many of these problems appeared to disappear in many
of the newer Intel EtherExpress cards. (There are some very early Intel
EtherExpress cards  that are nor supported, and are not likely to ever be
supported, but new ones bought now appear to work fine.

The cards with the DEC tulip chipset/support are heralded by many to be
superior in performance for file sharing servers when used by samba and
netatalk. If you buy one of the newer cards that has the DEC
chipset/support and you have a kernel that can support it, then this helps
to make a nicer file server.

A note on the NE/2000 and NE/20000 clones: Even if you are using them for
home, the cost savings/value for one of these new is not a good as even
the cheapest 3c509b TP0 cards. Simple network analysis of 3 different
NE2000 clone cards on my home LAN shows they never pushed more than 70%
ethernet capabilities when performing multiple flood pings from different
hosts at the same time. When using the Intel EtherExpress Pro, 3C509,
3c905, and the 3c589_cs (PCMCIA) cards, I was able to push 100%
utilitzation with large sized flood pings across my home network. Most
notable, was the increase performace for throughput, and drop in
collisions when *not* using the NE2000 clones. 

If you have only a few machines at home, and plan to *never* increase the
population of nodes on your LAN, then going with  NE2000 may work for you.

On Modems, repeating what everyone else said: Avoid WinModems, since
support for them is not native to Linux, and is not likelyto be included.
(Theory behind win modems: In order to save some money, the number of chip
included in modern modems, and functional specialized embeded processors
is decreased, and their functions are pushed into the O.S. with special
drivers. This means that traffic processing for modem I/O impacts the CPU
even more than just using a serial line, or an ISA card. Serialized I/O
can tax a system a bit to begin with with IRQ triggers for attention on
incomming data and moving data on the bus. By pushing processing and modem
processing to the SYSTEM CPU and off of the modem, you sacrifice system
performance even more when using a WinModem when compared to using a
non-winmodem. By putting these drivers in the OS, you make the hardware
very System dependent. Will Windows 2000 support all of the win modems
that windows 95 supported? Maybe, Maybe not. The older modems aremore
likely to be supported in most future OS while WinModems are not.
Summary: Winmodems have less chips and firmware, and are supposed to cost 
less, but slow down your machine more since the hardware that is removed
is *emulated* on the CPU in the O.S. which requires the driver to have
direct hardware access. This decrease portability of WinModems across
platforms. WinModem specs appear to be controlled, and are private.)

Do *not* over clock your CPU unless you really know what you are doing!

Also avoid over-clocking of your motherboard. Certainly, Windows 95 and 98
appear to be more tolerant of over-heating, and hardware devices missing
clock cycles, and communication. In windows, when you system appears to be
flakey, you thing, "Gee, that is windows!" but when you notice strange
problems when compiling large programs or when large applications (like
Netscape) suddenly quit at weird unpredictable times when in Linux,
something is more often wrong with the hardware (of course libs could be
bad, or corruption of files, but those are usually consistant in error.)
When I use a standard Linux installation on standard hardware and notice
the system is flakey, the problem is usually a bad hardware component, RQ
conflict, IO conflict over heating etc...

Examples of problems seen in Linux when you have memory, cpu, motherboard
over-heating or using clock cycles that are too fast for some devices:
freezes
inconsistant segmentation fault
compilation of programs halt with errors at different parts during
compilation or linking without modifications to the libraries or
configuration/makefiles.
Unable to boot
Services/process/daemones terminate unexpectedly without any aparent
reason
Serious increase in strange errors to your logs that appear to have no
consistancy.
You notice that your system appears to work well in the winter or at night
when it is colder, and worse during the summer.
You notice that once your system appears to be acting "strange" it
continues to do so after multiple reboots, but appears to work fine after
you shut it down and leave it off over-night...
(all of these may suggest over-heating and over clocking problems, but can
suggest other problems too...)

If you are planning on using this machine as a server, then use of SCSI
controllers and SCSI disks is a good idea. Use as a busy file server, use
an external hardware RAID-5 controller with hot swappable disks, and
automatic disk rebuilding on insertion of new disks. If this is just for
local use, ore a few other people, then IDE/EIDA/ATA/ATAPI hard drives are
fine, but keep them on their own interface if possible (one on Primary,
one on secondary, and if you must place a second drive as slave to one
interface, place it on the interface least often used like the non-system-
disk-based-interface.

Something you should seriously examine in making a system that you plan on
using as a dual-boot system are Video Card drivers. You say you want to
get a 3D accellerated card? Check with www.xfree86.org to see what 3D
accelerated card are supported by XFree86 (unless you want to go
commercial with your X Server) before you buyt your card! Not all 3d
accelerated cards are supported equally well reguardless of price.

Avoid use of special sound cards that need special DOS based drivers for
activation, or TSR (not as common anymore) to function properly. They will
require you to boot in DOS and use LOADLIN.EXE from there to start up
linux with sound support. (Some PnP support for sound cards is available
in Linux, but be-ware!) Some people suggest using sound compiled into your
kernel as a module so if your IRQ/IO/DMA are changed by PnP support in
Windows 95/98 that you can have the module deal with the changes...

Mouse? Ifyou can get a 3 button mouse, that has true 3 button support,
then X will be nicer with the three buttons instead of having to emulate
three buttons but pressing two buttons at the same time.

Bzzzz.

I think that buzzer means I am out of time. Many many URLs exit out there
to offer much more information and technical advice than I can include in
an e-mail message like this without people complaining about having to
wait too long to pick up their mail with POP... ;)

-M
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Systems Department Operating Systems Analyst for the Ruben Salazar Library
              of California State University at Sonoma.
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