Hey,
I hope I haven't given the impression that I don't like PCI cards, it's just that my e-smith server is for 14 users, and is a Pentium 133 with a 3.7gig hard drive.That machine [that i just described] was sitting in an old office for 3 years! it has a PCI bus on it, it also has an ISA bus. (I'm not cheap I'm resourceful)
Now, every worksation in my building has a PCI network card (we upgraded the entire enterprise from ISA etherlink III's, 1.5 years ago) I have so many ISA cards in my office that you could call it Mt. Etherlink!! (7 stacked boxes, to be exact)
One day I saw all of the old pentium 133's being sent off to the dump. (management thought that's where they belonged) I thought it was a waste so I took 8 of the 11 computers home and put red hat on them. I was reading a newsgroup that mentioned e-smith, and I thought I'd give it a try but when I saw that you needed PCI cards I was reluctant (a 3Com 3C905B cost's $129.99!! @compusmart victoria) after having a look around this phourm, I decided that It could be done with ISA card's.
So I tool two card's off of Mt. Etherlink and procceded to install e-smith on one box, after some trouble with the drivers/io/irq (wich you guys helped me out with
I got the box working. Man, this product is great, infact my boss is so pleased about it we are going to use up mt. etherlink by configuring all of our old server's (PII-333, 9.0 gig HDD, 128-512mb's of ram) with e-smith and implementing them around the enterprise.
as for ISA performance, I haven't noticed a nasty difference beetween ISA and PCI network cards, (but if I had a buget to build a webserver, i would defenetly go with PCI, but when it's a pet project I don't have a buget)
Thanks for you time,
Kenneth Kowalsky
That is my long story of why I still use ISA etherlink cards.