Network Cards for OpenBSD

The official links to read are for the OpenBSD Intel Hardware Support Page, a bit at the top of the Networking Setup FAQ.
And all supported cards and the needed IRQ/port settings are found in the INSTALL.i386 document at the OpenBSD FTP site or on the OpenBSD CD you should buy anyway.

But my lowdown is: For 486 machines needing "ISA" network cards, it's 3COM if you can get them, an NE2000 clone if you can't.

Those with a Pentium to half-waste on a firewall have many more options with PCI cards. With PCI, most of the popular brands are supported well.

3COM network cards are the cadillac of the industry. They are one of the few companies even still making "ISA" bus network cards, and they still have the nerve to charge over twice what others do. But they're very good, and the OpenBSD support for them is good. They'll be recognized with almost any IRQ and memory setting. Two things:

1. Use the config program on the floppy to make sure that Plug&Play is turned off
2. It says any configuration will work in the docs, but I found you shouldn't mix IRQ 11 and memory 210. Two that definitely work:
   1. IRQ 11 and memory 300
   2. IRQ 10 and memory 210

3COM cards can be found for prices like $10 and $15 in "Used Computer" stores that carry parts. At those prices, they're the perfect choice.

CAUTION: Don't use two 3COM cards in the same firewall. It's unclear why (perhaps all 3COM cards have to share one buffer space because of the way the driver is written..?) but they will drastically slow down long file transfers through the firewall. Little speed loss will be noted on web pages that are a lot of <20K files, but if you download a megabyte or two, you will see up to 75% drop in speed compared to not going through the firewall. Some speed loss going through a firewall with a large transfer is to be expected (say 10% max), but 75% is just unacceptable.

NE2000 clone cards, by contrast, are the lowball end. They are also the only ISA cards you can get, new, besides 3COM.

I tried one common model, the "Startech 10MBps ISA", which actually required you to use jumpers to set the IRQ and memory. Once that was done right, they worked fine.

The other is from D-Link and I haven't tried it but a post on the Net said it worked. The OpenBSD site docs won't go into any of this at all. They don't like NE2000 and won't help you.

With NE2000 clones, only two combinations of IRQ and memory work:
IRQ 9, memory 240 -- also requires the "iomem" or "boot PROM" location set to d8000 (may appear as "d800" on your card or in the config software)
IRQ 10, memory 300

The latter will make the card "ne1", the former "ne0".

Some NE2000 clones, most notably the "AOpen" (really, Acer) model ALN-101, are the ones you want: OpenBSD spots them and uses the Plug&Play it claims not to have to configure them to either IRQ 3 or 4. These become ne3 or ne4 as device names.

The ALN-101 certainly appears to work fine. Depending on the firewall speed, you may see the odd message about "ring buffer overflow on ne3", but this does not mean any data has been lost, merely that a packet or two had to be retransmitted at some minor loss of performance. Best of all, the ALN-101 is still available, new, and for a lower price than is usually charged for a 3COM that is used.

One NE2000 clone NIC I found in used equipment stores says "AT/LANtic" on the chipset. These cards appear to be configurable using a program called "autonic" supplied on the OpenDOS bootable disk supplied.

There are some puzzling features to these models, perfect examples of why people who would rather spend money than time avoid NE2000 clones altogether:

• I had the experience of only the 10/300 setting working for them when booting with the OpenBSD floppy, but then only 9/240 working after OpenBSD is installed and running from the larger hard disk kernel.
• Except that this didn't happen later on when I tried to demonstrate it to a class. Beats me. Maybe this only happens with a few machines depending on the BIOS, or something. If it happens to you, look for the phrase "timeout on device ne1" after booting from the hard drive. If you see it, try switching to 9/240.
• But, the help for "AUTONIC" doesn't mention the possibility of IRQ 9 with the AT/LANtic cards. The supplied batch file is just for 10/300.
• However, if you boot the OpenDOS disk, the option for IRQ 9 comes up after IRQ 15 before it wraps back around to IRQ 3. Then, if you run "AUTONIC ?" from the command line to get it to report the settings, it won't mention the IRQ at all, since it is illegal. Go figure.
• Stuff like this happens all the time with NE2000 clones. If they weren't so cheap and plentiful, I wouldn't be mentioning them. Hope you can find a 3COM and one of the AOPEN ALN-101 models. Or at worst, a StarTech or D-LINK.

   

  Beyond NE2000 Clones

  I can't help you. I made valiant tries to get SMC cards to work, which involves dodging around resource conflicts with other drivers in the kernel, as documented at length in the INSTALL.i386 document, but to no avail anway. They just didn't work for me. And I've never even found any of the other ISA cards mentioned in the INSTALL.i386 document.

  Configuring 3COM and NE2000 Clone NICs

  Config software for 3COM cards is available at the www.3com.com web site. Since they give it away, I've taken the liberty to assume that they won't mind if I post it here as well. If you understand how to make disk image files into floppy disks, you can make the bsdwall NIC Config Floppy.

  It is a DOS boot floppy, using the OpenDOS from DR-DOS. You have to do a simple DOS boot to use the 3COM or NE2000 config software. Digital Research DOS, or DR-DOS, was a frankly better DOS product than MS-DOS, which Microsoft used brazenly anticompetitive tactics to suppress, resulting in a confidential settlement of Caldera's antitrust lawsuit (estimated to be about $250 million). DR-DOS has decided to make it pretty freely available as "OpenDOS" - which is just a coincidence of names, nothing at all to do with OpenBSD. Unsurprisingly, the vastly richer Microsoft has not done such a generous deed with their DOS product, so we happily offer our NIC configuration disk using an OpenDOS 7.01 boot.

  Boot your system with the NICs installed from the floppy and you can use the batch files like "10.bat" to just set a 3COM Etherlink III to 11/300 or 10/210 or 7/210. The file atlantic.bat will set an AT/LANtic card to 10/300. The autoexec.bat file will print a list of the batch file "commands" available upon boot-up. It should simplify the configuration of any Etherlink III or Etherlink II card, or an AT/LANtic card, considerably.