[ale] NIC recommendations??

[jenn at colormaria.com]

In the ongoing quest for less dropped packets, I did something I should've done 2 weeks ago...ifconfig. Duh.  Here's the interesting bits of output on my external NIC on my external router (ie, the only NIC that touches IBM's network):

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:12489015 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:17773919 errors:1044846 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:2089692
          collisions:75672 txqueuelen:100

Uptime: 3 days
So I believe my mystery is solved...the most recent info I can find about the particular card and driver (NetGear with a RealTek chip, driver 8139too) is for kernel 2.4.6 (I'm using .7 so not too far off).  Others have reported similar behaviour under high traffic, which explains my fluctuations in packet loss as well.  

So on to the question -- what do those of you in high-traffic environments use NICwise?  I've had success with linksys believe it or not, and miserable experiences with 3com and Intel eepro.  I'm hesitant to just patch this driver b/c I'm seeing reports that the patches don't fix this particular problem.

Any input??

TIA
jenn


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