On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 12:30:32AM +0000, Mr. Adam ALLEN wrote:
On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 19:47 +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I have had success with little or no effort with various USB ethernet thingies, but sadly cannot tell you which ones as they were unbranded el-cheapo purchased in an emergency from a local computer shop.
Perhaps this is just down to individual hardware, but worth a post of caution in any case. I used a DLINK-USB (DUSB-E100) Ethernet dongle with an old-ish 2.6.12 kernel...
Every time the link dropped the only way to restore connectivity was with a rmmod/modprobe dance. (I'm not sure if it was the Dlink DSL-300T on the other end that caused the problems- but that's another piece of kit I wouldn't recommend).
Upgrading that machine to Fedora Core 6, and I couldn't get *any* traffic out of the Dlink USB (2.6.18 kernel)... Can't remember now if the link came up or not. Downgrading to the last of the FC5 kernels... and it works.
If I had a choice again I'd choose something other than the DUSB-E100. (Of course the "other" might use the same broken chipset/be completely unsupported... but that's life).
Personally I think it's just that USB is a crap interface, even with Win2k and XP I find it unreliable and, more to the point, unpredictable.