chris@COLUMBIA.EDU (Chris Maio) (09/26/88)
I need to buy a couple of PC ethernet boards and from the little I know about what's available, I'm leaning towards the WD8003. I need something that will perform well in promiscuous mode for ethernet monitoring, but I'd like to get something which is also relatively cheap, reliable, and well-enough supported by TCP/IP software implementations that I can recommend to other people as more offices here are wired up for ethernet. Are there any known reliability or compatibility problems with these boards (e.g. do they perform well in promiscuous mode? Will they work in a WonUnder chassis plugged into a Toshiba laptop?)? Is there any reason why I'd want a different board for promiscuous-mode ethernet monitoring? Do you know of any TCP/IP packages that do or don't support these boards? I gather that FTP Software has a driver, and NCSA seems to support the WD PC-bus cards (but not their microchannel card?). What about CMU PC-IP, PC-NFS, KA9Q, ... ? Besides NCSA, are there any drivers for these cards available in source form? Is there any difference in how the three WD boards are programmed, aside from the different amount of buffering available? Is there any particular good place to buy these boards from? Please reply by mail to chris@columbia.edu or columbia!chris; I'll summarize if there's interest. Thanks. Chris Maio Columbia University