Re: Drivers for 3Com Etherlink III - 3C589B?

[Eugene.Fiume@imag.fr (Eugene Fiume)]

} Can someone give me directions on where I can find the driver and 
} configure the PC card to use trumpet?  We have no resident experts on PC 
} networking at our site.  I do plan on running Linux on the TP once I 
} figure out how to do it, and I am in the process of investigating what I 
} need to do.

My background: I started by learning about packet drivers on DOS and
Windows.  I got them to talk to my PE-200 (an NE-2000 clone) card under
both.  I got kermit to talk TCP/IP under DOS and Trumpet and a variety
of other things to talk TCP/IP and NFS under Windows 3.11.  This
required a longer learning curve than I wanted, because I thought for
sure that things just *had* to be harder with a UNIX system (despite
the fact that I'm a UNIX guy).  I was wrong.  If you are serious about
going to Linux and your card is supported by Linux, then just do it.
Of the solutions under Windows, I in fact found that the winsock provided
with the Trumpet software seemed to give more reliable and better performance
than the software provided by Microsoft.  Even so, it is consistently about
1/3 the performance at best of my Linux setup.  Now, I must say that if
you're happy with 1Mbps or so burst performance, which really ain't bad,
then you'll be happy with the Windows solution mentioned by someone else,
or with the Trumpet solution I used most often.  But I personally have
not found anything to match the reliability and performance of the Linux
solution, except perhaps for another UNIX implementation, which I haven't
tried.

} Also, if I upgrade MS Windows 3.11 to WWG 3.11, would I be able to mount 
} the disks on our unix workstations and fileserver?  Or would I need Sun 
} PC-NFS or similar software?

As another poster mentioned, it is possible to avoid PC-NFS.  I used the
shareware Tropic NFS briefly, to share filesystems with a variety of Suns
and SGI machines.  Throughput wasn't great, but it was acceptable.  There
are lots of solutions around that cost more money, but once I started
using Linux, I erased the other solutions.  I really don't mean this to
soundlike an advocacy post.  I tried many solutions, and all have their
merits.

Oh, Linux hint for the day: I've plugged into several different networks
using Linux on my TP755CE and have been very happily up and running
within minutes every time.  At one site, however, a lab manager gave me
more credit for knowing what I was doing than I did...turns out I was
turning on routed and my TP was sufficiently trusted to become a
default router for their network.  This, um, caused problems.  So,
if you are a mobile network user and don't plan to be a name server
or router for anyone, you should ensure this is disabled in your
startup.  By the way, does anyone have any documentation for the gated
that is distributed at various Linux sites?

Regards,
Eugene Fiume.