On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Jim Shankland <nanog@shankland.org> wrote:
Nvidia NICs ... as my mother said, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. So the rest is silence.
Hi Jim, My mother wasn't quite so adamant, she just said "don't cuss", so I'll try to keep it clean as I relate my experiences with these "NICs of our affliction". As you're probably aware, Nvidia doesn't really have it together in terms of playing nicely with open source folks. The Linux driver is horribly reverse-engineered and the execution of the implementation is even worse - it couldn't figure out the card's actual MAC address so it assigned a random (and until recently often invalid, with an OUI from bogus space) address. This resulted in some interesting stuff in our switch logs. My recollection is that FreeBSD was no better. We had one batch that refused to pass traffic at 1000/full even when forced. Left me pining for nice reliable stuff like counterfeit Cisco hardware bought from a shady eBay store out of Hong Kong. But I digress. Eventually we voted with our feet; I gave strict instructions to our build guys to stop wasting our time with crummy NICs with no support, and insisted that they pay the small amount of extra money it takes to go with Intel. If you're looking for a funny "prank" to play on your tech staff, speccing a batch of these, sitting back, and watching the fun would get two thumbs up from me... but otherwise steer clear. Drive Slow, Paul Wall