Comm Slot II 10/100 Ethernet Cards

Fizzbinn

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Nov 29, 2021
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Results!

1722913922283.png


Your new card certainly holds its own against the other 100Mb PCI cards! Certainly faster then the regular Apple CS II card!

Reminder on the test environment from a few posts back, these tests were from/to my Raspberry Pi 4 "retro home server" running MacIPRpi (1Gbps Ethernet) with both the PM 6500/275 and the Pi connected via an Apple Airport Extreme 6th Generation's Gigabit capable Ethernet ports. The software used was Newer Tech "Performance" v1.3 which is included in their EtherTech 1.5 installer.
 

Fizzbinn

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@Androda Is it correct to assume that the Farallon 993v14 driver would work with any PCI Ethernet card based on the RTL8139? There aren't any vendor/manufacture checks, something like MAC OUI ranges?

I was curious about your 3D printed "mounting tang", didn't know conductive plastic was a thing. I had wondered if I might be able to swap in the metal mounting tang from one of the CS or CS II modems I have but the jack knock outs are not wide enough. The one you made you made seems to be more than good enough though.
 

Mac84

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This is an excellent card, I tested it in my Power Mac 4400 and it worked great under System 7.5.3, 7.6.1 and 8.1

Overall, the card is very zippy. I copied a 150MB file over an Ethernet AppleTalk network (from a Mac mini G4) in just a hair under 3 minutes.
File downloads using a web browser seem to be maxing out at around 220 KB/sec (at least against my web sever). These speeds were consistent across all the operating system versions I tried. Highly recommended! (y)
 
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Androda

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@Androda Is it correct to assume that the Farallon 993v14 driver would work with any PCI Ethernet card based on the RTL8139? There aren't any vendor/manufacture checks, something like MAC OUI ranges?
It's possible, but I don't really know. Tried some random MAC addresses during testing and not all of them worked. That's part of the reason there are three: those ones worked properly.

didn't know conductive plastic was a thing
Yeah it's pretty funky stuff. Doesn't print amazingly well, but still "good enough."
 
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Fizzbinn

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It's possible, but I don't really know. Tried some random MAC addresses during testing and not all of them worked. That's part of the reason there are three: those ones worked properly.

The MAC address OUI prefix (00:00:C5) on the card I got from you appears to match what Farallon was using for their real PN993 NetLINE 10/100 cards:


That OUI prefix is now registered to "ARRIS Group, Inc." which I'm guessing is where Farallon's stuff ended up after 20 years of mergers and acquisitions.

Curious, were the MAC addresses you tried that didn't work from a different MAC address OUI prefix?
 

Fizzbinn

Tinkerer
Nov 29, 2021
189
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Charlottesville, VA
The MAC address OUI prefix (00:00:C5) on the card I got from you appears to match what Farallon was using for their real PN993 NetLINE 10/100 cards:


That OUI prefix is now registered to "ARRIS Group, Inc." which I'm guessing is where Farallon's stuff ended up after 20 years of mergers and acquisitions.

Curious, were the MAC addresses you tried that didn't work from a different MAC address OUI prefix?

I ended up buying one of those Farallon PN993 NetLINE 10/100 PCI cards just because. Perhaps unsurprisingly it seems to perform the same as @Androda's card.