Supported NIC chipsets?

[tnelson]

Could you tell me what NIC chipsets are supported by RaqCop? I have a couple of Raq4i units that I would like to use with an addon 2 or 4 port PCI NIC. Thank you!

--Tim

[Davesworld]

All the nics that IPCop normally supports will also work in the pci slot of the raq units and even USB even though USB nics are not raved about glowingly and the raq units are usb 1.1 only. No drivers were taken away that already exist in a normal IPCop so if a nic isn't supported, it also isn't supported in a non cobaltized IPCop. Any particular nic that you wanted to use?

[tnelson]

Thank you for the quick reply! I'm hoping to throw in either a Compaq dual server NIC (Thunderlan chipset) or a Sun quad NIC (DEC/Intel/Happymeal chipset?!?).

[Davesworld]

There is one thing to consider here and that is the power consumption of the nics. I have a number of dual ether pro 100 pci cards here and they do use the dec pci bridge chip in them as well as dual i82558B Intel nic chips on them, in fact the Symantec Velociraptors based on the Gen III Cobalt platform came with these cards as well but they also removed the scsi controller, not sure if this was a cost saving move or a power consideration. In my Raq 4i, I was using one of these same dual intel nics (Compaq branded one in this case) and when I would stream audio over blue to my phone, it would crap out red requiring a reboot to get it going again. Red was on the second port of the dual i82558 card. I just got a dual National Semiconductor DP83816 board with a Ti PCI2250 pci chip  from Soekris and installed it in mine and am waiting for my two hour isp ip lease to be up so I can connect red again. The dual DP83816 board only draws 1.5w, their quad board only draws 2.8w. Many nics draw upwards of 4 watts per interface. As a point of reference with blue crashing red when streaming, some time ago I tried using blue as the gateway for my voip box, when I was a few minutes into a phone call, it too crashed red on the dual 82558 board and restarting the network would not restore it. I suppose if I rmmod'ed it and then restarted the network it may have worked. I also tried using one of my spare boxes for testing this but I put a pcmcia card reader and my Novatel XU870 card in and used the connection to AT&T HSDPA as red this time and hooked my access point to eth1 or rather BLUE and proceeded to stream somafm over my wifi enable phone, it had worked flawlessly except the latency from the cellular data connection is under 200ms on a good day so at least I can conclude that ipcop doesn't have a problem between blue and red and that the built in 82559er chips aren't necessarily part of whatever caused it. It's purely a guess at this point. About another half hour and I can connect red again.

http://www.soekris.com/lan16x1.htm

Another interesting tidbit is that the DP83816 macPHYTer 2 uses the same natsemi driver as the DP83815 macPHYter, the latter is used in the Qube and the RAQ XTR. I was easily able to open a terminal, minicom over serial port in this case and have it probe for a driver, it easily identified and loaded the natsemi driver. I really like the fact that National Semiconductor has for some time concentrated on using a thinner substrate much like the CPU industry has done but in this case, to save power. In a Cobalt with a 60 watt power supply we DO care about this.

[Davesworld]

Well, the DP83816 works just as well but when streaming audio across blue while also downloading through green to one of my local computers, it finally crashed red. I haven't tried to duplicate it on another actual Raq yet or even a non raq. Running blue across the test box using a 3G connection does have one important thing to consider, it is running the cvs version of the upcoming 1.4.20 IPCop patched for a cobalt as I always have to do here. It has the 2.4.36 kernel in it but I'm not so sure that is the reason. I'm using all four zones but don't have the orange nic connected to anything yet but it is on so to speak.

[Davesworld]

Update. I just transferred my new red and orange dual Natsemi nic and harddrive to one of my Velociraptors and hooked up and had been streaming over blue for a while and then it happened, I lost my red connection again so this time I decided that I will just use the two built in nics on my original Raq with a green and red network. The only thing I haven't tried yet is to drop it down to three nics and have green red and blue but orange was there but not being used. I simply don't understand why blue survives just fine when red is ppp even a very fast 1.8mbs ppp at that over hsdpa. None of it makes any sense to me. Last time I was streaming, I had little activity on green so it was only asking IPCop to route from red to blue. Very strange and there is no conclusion yet. BTW, I'm proxied into my test box through hsdpa to type this while I wait for Verizon to free up the mac addy on my last red nic.

Other thoughts: The machine that blue doesn't crash red is using the 2.4.36 kernel. Looking at the changes from 2.4.34 there may be some factors that could have been fixed. I will try using all four zones on a 1.4.20 box in the near future. I may also try throwing a dual nic plus another in my Dell SFF GX100 and try running that one with blue streaming steadily to see if it crashes IPCop on a non cobalt machine. That one has a 466 Celery processor.

[ceelight]

Thanks for posting your experience here!

I should have read this before: I just ordered a Compaq NC3122 (and a RaQ4r by the way) as I have made good experience with the NC3122 in my "old" IPCop. So the result of your tests is that it just won't work sufficient?

On blue I have my VoIP-Phone, on orange my RaQ2 and green is my LAN. What do you think? Will I    inescapably have problems with the NC3122?

Thanks!

[Davesworld]

Thanks for posting your experience here!

I should have read this before: I just ordered a Compaq NC3122 (and a RaQ4r by the way) as I have made good experience with the NC3122 in my "old" IPCop. So the result of your tests is that it just won't work sufficient?

On blue I have my VoIP-Phone, on orange my RaQ2 and green is my LAN. What do you think? Will I    inescapably have problems with the NC3122?

Thanks!

Nah, I'm all but convinced the there is something unique about my setup that is doing this and why only on blue? On my test box which is NOT connected directly to dsl, this doesn't happen. I'm convinced that the nic has nothing to do with it. I also tried only using a three zone setup as well as swapping blue and orange so that blue is using one of the ports of the dual pci nic, NOT eth1 and it is always the same. I have several of those Dual Intel nics and my Velociraptor 500's came with that exact nic and it was essentially a Raq 4 with a firewall os but only clocked at 300mhz, their higher models using the same hardware but higher clock speed could handle hundreds of users. There are several brands of that nic but they all use dual 82557/8 chips and a Dec pci bridge chip. They are actually a very proven nic in the gen III platform which is why I was so puzzled. I'm the only one I have ever heard of this happening to as of now. If you are using voip on blue and it doesn't crash red during a phone call or anything else that would stream steady data, then you're fine. 

[ceelight]

OK, thanks!

So, I'll wait for the device (can't wait ), give it a try and will report here.

[Davesworld]

OK, thanks!

So, I'll wait for the device (can't wait ), give it a try and will report here.

That'll help a lot. If you were nearby I'd give you one of mine as I have more of those than I do Gen III raqs, both Velociraptors came with them already and I bought five more off of EBay for about ten dollars which leaves me with two Raq 4i's to put them in not to mention my Soekris dual nic I bought. Personally, I have always felt that the Intel and 3Com nics seem to be the true hardware nics even though so many implementations of the er nics need the hardware checksum disabled in anything but the 9 year old eepro100 driver by Donald Becker of NASA which some still use. I have seen some on the IPCop community that had bottlenecks from using a pseudo nic and switched to a hardware nic and the problems were gone. I wish I had a faster than 3mbs dsl pipe to test the throughput capabilities of our nice little Raqs and Qubes running Raqcop. Brian has a faster cable connection and IPCop on a raq 4i beats his router that the cable company gave him. He gets well over 10mbs through the firewall but I really want to see if it can reach somewhere closer to 90mbs. I know that true line speed is usually not even possible through the nics themselves. I remember a throughput test that was run by a leading online publication where they took a Nokia IP330 (400mhz AMD K6-2) a Cisco router (around a 450mhz Pentium or thereabouts) and Smoothwall which IPCop forked from with a PII 450 in it and they all throughputted close to 90mbs through the firewall to the internet and they ran some sort of test software to simulate multiples of users. Smoothie held up well but yes, IPCop has evolved much since then but has many of the original Smoothwall devel team members anyway.

[ceelight]

I expect my RaQ 4r (512 MB RAM, 2x 30GB HD) tomorrow and will start working on it this week. I hope to get it run until the weekend. But there's one question: what about the second HD I have? Should I just unplug it?

btw: I've got a german T-Com DSL16000/1024 line. Just let me know which tests you need....

[Davesworld]

I'd probably unplug it. I'm sure raid could be done but on a firewall/router it seems overkill. Olaf mentioned that he uses Flash drives mostly on his IPCop units. I hardly use my proxy anyway anymore. Hopefully it won't be long before I get an install script. The same person is also co-working on a new 2.6 kernel based flash rom that will allow the use of usb drives. This would take most of the hassle out of installing this. The current roms when doing a network install, use NFS. Our current method is rather crude but works well. In the end I like these low power headless appliances for firewall usage.

[ceelight]

Sorry for being so late. I destroyed the first RaQ4 by flashing it wrong...  Now I have a new one. So, I tested and have the same power problem after a couple of hours.

Code:

red: Connectioncheck: fail before pppd start no sync, trying again

[Davesworld]

I have seen that same error on a modem connection by pointing the dialer to the wrong port regardless of hardware and even not necessarily on IPCop. You using dialup? I see the pppd being called there. That isn't a power problem at all.

BTW, the power shouldn't be an issue unless you are using quad giganics and even that is pure speculation. besides, next version of Raqcop will support flash installations with the mkflash script, there's your power savings if you need it. You know you're starving your unit if the lcd backlight goes dim. Backlight flutter during load is normal and a CF installation may get rid of that.

You live in Germany don't you Cee? A unit can be recovered from a bad flash if you have soldering skills. Many people go ahead and make a plug in socket conversion while they are at it. There is a new flashrom around the corner that has the 2.6 kernel embedded in it plus it can boot from usb devices. BTW, according to Tim Hockin, one of the original Cobalt engineers, some Raq 3's shipped with the Flashrom socket which was used during development. A Raq3 and Raq4 are absolutely identical hardware including the power supply, only the multiplier jumper and core voltage are different. I had a couple units based on the 3 that came clocked at 300mhz, well, now they are running low voltage 500's at 550. These units use laptop processors which are only different by core thickness and subsequently used a lower core voltage. The ones I have are rare. They only use 1.8v rather than 2.0 or 2.2 of the desktop versions so I changed the core down to 1.8 and clocked it to 550. Runs as cool as a cucumber.


root@testcop:~ # cat /proc/cobalt/sensors/thermal
0 [CPU]: 33
root@testcop:~ #
 
Yup, 33c, It has never even reached 40.

[ceelight]

I have seen that same error on a modem connection by pointing the dialer to the wrong port regardless of hardware and even not necessarily on IPCop. You using dialup? I see the pppd being called there. That isn't a power problem at all.

It's actually PPPoE (ADSL2 in Germany).

I made a test:
- the onboard NICs are green and blue
- the PCI NICs are red and orange

I put the raqcop in my green net of the old Cop (static IP) and let it run a couple of days. No problems. Only green and red on the raqcop were connected. Then I plugged my orange net (RaQ2 with bittorrent) on the raqcop orange. Put some traffic on it and bang - network was down. No idea...

BTW, the power shouldn't be an issue unless you are using quad giganics and even that is pure speculation. besides, next version of Raqcop will support flash installations with the mkflash script, there's your power savings if you need it. You know you're starving your unit if the lcd backlight goes dim. Backlight flutter during load is normal and a CF installation may get rid of that.

That's good to hear!

And the destroyed flash, well, I don't know if I should really fix it. It's a shame I know, but I havn't that much time at the moment... I'll porbably buy another RaQ4 from a guy here in my city. He still has some to sell, so no problem. I already took everything out to have some spare parts

Cheers
Cee