Re: [Fwd:] Nvidia NICs with duplicate mac addresses

* Paul Wall · * Fri Sep 05 15:46:00 2008

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Jim Shankland <[email protected]> wrote:

> Nvidia NICs ... as my mother said, if you can't say anything nice,
> don't say anything at all.  So the rest is silence.

Hi Jim,

My mother wasn't quite so adamant, she just said "don't cuss", so I'll
try to keep it clean as I relate my experiences with these "NICs of
our affliction".

As you're probably aware, Nvidia doesn't really have it together in
terms of playing nicely with open source folks.  The Linux driver is
horribly reverse-engineered and the execution of the implementation is
even worse - it couldn't figure out the card's actual MAC address so
it assigned a random (and until recently often invalid, with an OUI
from bogus space) address.  This resulted in some interesting stuff in
our switch logs.

My recollection is that FreeBSD was no better.  We had one batch that
refused to pass traffic at 1000/full even when forced.  Left me pining
for nice reliable stuff like counterfeit Cisco hardware bought from a
shady eBay store out of Hong Kong.

But I digress.  Eventually we voted with our feet; I gave strict
instructions to our build guys to stop wasting our time with crummy
NICs with no support, and insisted that they pay the small amount of
extra money it takes to go with Intel.  If you're looking for a funny
"prank" to play on your tech staff, speccing a batch of these, sitting
back, and watching the fun would get two thumbs up from me...  but
otherwise steer clear.

Drive Slow,
Paul Wall