D945GCLF2 Board, Atom330

dreamslacker

Hardware bugs that vary from one implementation to another are the problem. There are countless work arounds that keep getting added to the Realtek drivers in FreeBSD (and no doubt other OSes as well, I don't follow others as closely though) as people keep finding hardware that's buggy in new and different ways from other implementations of the exact same chipset.

Aye aye. Some of the issues are due to implementation of "features" in new OSes that don't play well with the firmware on the NIC's too.
eg. The problem my friend faced with the Yukon was that 1/2 the chips don't work well in Vista without a new driver patch because the chip wouldn't respond properly to the PCI-e Link Power Management.
Oddly, the same driver paired with an external card on the same chipset works fine. It's just the integrated chipset that won't play well. There are no issues with WinXP or other OS flavours either. The only solution was to manually disable the Link power state management in Vista Device Manager or update to a "newer" driver provided by the manufacturer (which does exactly just that).

cwilkinson

Well, I've had the box up and running in production for about 3 days so far and no problems, yet.

dreamslacker

System has been running for 5 days without a hiccup now.
Uptime is 9 days though (since the last hiccup resolved without a reboot).

It could have been a backend issue on my ISP side but I never got a notification from them. Time to cause them a little more grief I guess.
Had already made them replace the CPE (Cisco 1710 to Cisco 877) just because I didn't like the fact that they gave me a end-of-line and end-of-shelflife CPE. Just told them that the 1710 was flaky and churned out some "evidence" of the hop between my router and the CPE taking as long as 100ms.
The engineer who came down had a nice time though. I let him play World of Warcraft for 2 hours (I run a CyberCafe) and told the n.o.c. that he was running tests for me during that time.

Only thing I couldn't figure out is why they actually deployed the connection the way they did it. All the other ISP's provide an IPoA connection and the CPE is a Bridge/ Gateway combo. Thus, allowing me to deploy my own bridge cum gateway if I don't like their equipment. Or for that matter, actually modifying their CPE for my uses; did it before by flashing a ST516 and converting it into bridged mode (I told them and they said it was ok as long as I return the modem in good working condition).

This ISP actually has the CPE as a BGP router so I can technically access their "internal" network. They conveniently gave me the cisco console cable too. Or more so, the engineer was too lazy to lug the box of accessories back. He didn't have an issue when I told him I could re-configure the 877 so long as I didn't lock the n.o.c. out from the 877.

geeknik

I just broke 90 days uptime with pfsense running on this board. Sadly, I'm going to have to take the router down for maintenance in the next few days as I'm having a dedicated 100 amp circuit run to my office. Why? Because I'm running running 14 computers on 1 20amp circuit which isn't really smart. ;) Hehe.