[K12OSN] Recommended Gigabit Network card?

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello everyone,

Well it seems the issue has been resolved on its own!  I finally was
able to crack one of the machines open, and lo-and-behold, it already
had a gigabit card on-board!

Specifically the Intel 82573E gigabit NIC (more info:
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=26550 ).  Granted it doesn't
support Jumbo frames, but that would be looking the gift-horse in the
mouth :)

I guess I never expected that we'd get freely donated machines at the
level of having onboard gigabit so I was assuming the worst. These
machines are a bit more powerful than I thought -- Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz,
1 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA drives, gigabit NIC, onboard Intel 945 g/p
graphics AND an installed ATI Radeon X1600 256 MB video card with DVI
output. New keyboards, mice, and 19" NEC LCDs to go with them!

So now that the gigabit issue has been resolved, the next issue to ask is:
1) Which video card to use? Onboard Intel or ATI card?
2) With such a machine, would it be beneficial to run something
locally? Firefox perhaps?

I'm currently running K12LTSP based on Fedora 10

Thanks
Joseph



On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Jeff Siddall <news at siddall.name> wrote:
> On 09/30/2010 12:16 PM, Joseph Bishay wrote:
>> Hello Jeff,
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Jeff Siddall <news at siddall.name> wrote:
>>> Have you considered all the costs of using those old PCs?
>> <snip>
>>> I had access to a bunch of old PCs for my LTSP setup and I chose not to
>>> use any of them since they ended up being more expensive than buying new.
>>>
>>> Jeff
>>
>> I have yes -- the issue is that this is a matter of numbers up-front,
>> rather than long-term costs.  It's a perception issue basically.
>> While you are correct that a new motherboard will cost me $80 and save
>> me $X in the future, it will still cost me $80 now.  That $80 I can't
>> get approved -- not possible as I've already tried.
>>
>> The best option to maintain good performance is to take these new
>> computers we just received, and -- while spending as little as
>> possible -- maximize their performance.  The server already has the
>> maximum amount of RAM loaded into it, and has 2 gigabit network cards.
>>  All the switches are gigabit also.  So the best remaining option is
>> the NICs inside the clients.  Unless there is something else I've
>> missed?
>
> Understood.  Unfortunately some organizations have no long term vision.
>
> Keep in mind though that going from FE to GE may not actually buy you
> any performance as there may be processing or graphics subsystem
> bottlenecks that are more of a limitation than bandwidth.
>
> Best bet may be to try one with an onboard NIC and see if it works OK.
> If not, buy a GE NIC and see if anything improves.
>
> Jeff
>
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