Problem with Epia 800 and Freebsd 5.3

[Chuck Swiger]

Lord Raiden wrote:
> Just installed 5.3 onto an Epia 800 just a few weeks back and aside from 
> the controlers being bloody picky as hell (got that fixed by using 
> special cables), the stupid lan card is now giving me fits just a day 
> after I put it into active service.  Here's the error I'm getting in my 
> logs repeatedly.
> 
>  > vr0: rx packet lost
>  > vr0: watchdog timeout

Yeah, I've seen that network flakyness with vr0 on my EPIA M8000 (or whatever 
the model number is).

Using a really good cable and a switch port seems to help, and the VIA Rhine 
NIC seems OK for low traffic, but I'm still using a 300MHz old P2 Dell box with 
an fxp0 rather than my EPIA as a local proxy server as I had wanted to do.

-- 
-Chuck

PS: I'm giving some thought to getting a Mac Mini instead.  The EPIA case I've 
got is reasonably small, 11" x ~24" x 4", but a Mini is 6.5" x 6.5" x 2"...!