That reminds me, some more information on our problems with these cards:

One of our machines would disappear from the network every day or two as
well.  It always happened at night (which I believe can be linked to more
web surfing at that time, which leads to more traffic on that server).  We
were able to fix it by unplugging the cable and plugging it back in (which
caused the interface to go up-down).  We tried forcing it to 10MBit but
that made no difference.

Adam Maloney
Systems Administrator
Sihope Communications

On 8 Nov 2000 jack at jacku.com wrote:

> FWIW I used to run  the labs at Duluth Business Univ. and before I got there the stock card they put in was the 3C905B-TX. (And an earlier 905 variant) We had no end of trouble under Win 95 with some of these cards. In many machines (maybe 20%-30%) they would occasionally "lose contact" with the network. The only way regain a connection was to shutdown (not restart) the system, count to 15 or 20, and reboot. This worked 99% of the time. The other 1% required doing the process twice. (Usually because the wait was not long enough.) 
> 
> Take what you will from that information. Personally I would replace your card with an equivilant Linksys card. At DBU we switched to Linksys while I was there and only one failure and that was a DOA card. 
> 
> Jack
> 
> On Tue, 07 November 2000, Yaron wrote:
> 
> > 
> >   Hi,
> > 
> > Kinda off topic, but has anyone had this happen to them before?
> > 
> > I've got a 3com 3c905-TC NIC. Used to work fine, now it apparently is
> > dropping about 25% of all packets. Movied it to another machine and it
> > does the sam there. All the other NICs are 3coms, most of them also 905's
> > (though various models). 
> > 
> > One reason I think it might NOT be the NIC is I've done some TCPDUMPs, and
> > when you're pinging other machines they send out arp requests for this
> > card every 10 seconds or so. Pinging from other nics doesn't do that.
> > 
> > Anyone have any ideas before I go get a new 3com?
> > 
> > 
> > -Yaron
> > 
> > --
> > 
> > 
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