asterisk users - May 2004 - What a Difference a NIC makes

Just to throw this out there for the group.  I had a box of OEM SMC NICs and
have been using them in all systems I build including * boxes.  They seem to
work great in Windows machines and even plain old Linux workstations but
apparently not all that well when realtime is required.  I would get random and
usually sparse disconnects and lose registrations with phones and IAX peers.  I
kept getting "eth0 too much work at interrupt" and thought that it was
an irq problem.  I made sure that nothing was sharing IRQs and the problem still
persisted.  Finally looking at the error and ruling out the interrupt part I was
left with the eth0 part.

Long story made short I swapped out the SMC NICs with 3com and the world is
right again.  I have absolutely no errors in the console and every phone and
peer stays available.  If you are having problems and connot isolate why, try
another NIC.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro
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> Just to throw this out there for the group.  I had a box of OEM SMC NICs
> and have been using them in all systems I build including * boxes.  They
> seem to work great in Windows machines and even plain old Linux
> workstations but apparently not all that well when realtime is required.
> I would get random and usually sparse disconnects and lose registrations
> with phones and IAX peers.  I kept getting "eth0 too much work at
> interrupt" and thought that it was an irq problem.  I made sure that
> nothing was sharing IRQs and the problem still persisted.  Finally looking
> at the error and ruling out the interrupt part I was left with the eth0
> part.
>
> Long story made short I swapped out the SMC NICs with 3com and the world
> is right again.  I have absolutely no errors in the console and every
> phone and peer stays available.  If you are having problems and connot
> isolate why, try another NIC.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve Totaro

I'm having this very same problem with 3COM 3c905-tx/tx-m NIC. I never
thought it might somehow relate to Asterisk. My kernel is 2.4.26 with
Debian patches (distro is unstable Debian SID) and motherboard has VIA
chipset.

Regards,
Harry Flink