[mythtv-users] Motherboard recommendation

[Mike Perkins]

On 19/08/14 15:28, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2014 09:18:16 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> On 8/18/2014 5:05 PM, Dan Wilga wrote:
>>> - At least 3 Ethernet ports, using an Intel chipset
>>
>> You're not going to find anything with three ethernet ports.  You might
>> find something with two ports, and a third dedicated IPMI port.  The
>> only way you're going to get more than two functional ports is with a
>> discrete card.  I can understand two, if you want to use this as a
>> router, but I don't know what value three would be.
>
> I can think of several uses for more ethernet ports.
>
> A common router configuration is:
>
> Port 1: WAN
> Port 2: DMZ
> Port 3: Main protected subnet
>
> And often you also want your wireless connection on a separate subnet
> too.
>
> While standard on business networks, having a DMZ for your Internet
> accessible servers is not so common for home networks.  But there are
> those of us (like me) who do that - I have been running my own web and
> SMTP servers since I first got a broadband connection.
>
> Another use is to have a separate subnet for the kids, with full
> protections applied to it (eg forcing all web traffic through a proxy
> server).
>
> Having a separate subnet for connecting your ethernet tuners seems to
> also be something that has been recommended, since a lot of them use
> UDP to transmit the data and just one lost packet due to congestion
> can cause a problem in a recording.
>
> Having an extra ethernet port can also be used for less common things,
> like two bonded ethernet connections to double the throughput - useful
> when moving around huge files like HD recordings.  With a
> configuration like that (two bonded 1 gigabit ports), you have enough
> bandwidth that the lan connection is faster than any except the
> fastest SSD drives, so you get real-time transfer from disk on one box
> to disk on another.
>
> I agree with wanting Intel chipsets for ethernet too - there are some
> pretty bad Linux drivers for some of the Realtek chipsets that are
> common on motherboards, and they cause lots of problems.  The Intel
> drivers are excellent, as are the Intel chipsets.  On my MythTV box,
> the otherwise excellent motherboard (Asus M5A97 Evo) has an
> RTL8111/8168/8411 ethernet port, which just stops working every so
> often when I copy big files through it using SMB protocol.  So I added
> a dual Intel PCIe card, and that has also increased the throughput and
> given me a separate subnet I used to use for my satellite box.
>
To match your sample of one I'll add an opposite: I have never, ever had any 
problems with any board with a Realtek NIC chipset; but the drivers for several 
Intel NIC sets have proven to be more problematic.

For example, the chipset for one driver consistently failed the startup checksum 
test because of a fault with the firmware ROM; the corresponding Windows driver 
always worked, because it ignored the checksum test!

-- 

Mike Perkins