Linux Token Ring Support Bringing Down Corporate Nets?

mjh asks: "I've been running Debian GNU/Linux on my company supplied laptop for 3 months now. I got permission from my manager to run it on the network, but I did not go through the somewhat rigorous process of getting the software certified. I have legitimate business reasons for using it on the corporate network (which is why my manager approved it). I even managed to get Lotus Notes to run under wine so I never had to boot into Winders at all (unless someone sent me a PPT doc). I was pretty happy...until I brought the entire network down." Anyone else running Linux on a Token Ring network who would care to talk about their own experiences?

"My company runs Token Ring at the office (puke!) I got drivers from the card manufacturer (Madge), and I'd been happily churning along. Then last week, we started seeing a bunch of errors on the network. These errors would bring everyone on the ring down. After a week of this kinda stuff, they eventually isolated it to me.

Reboot the laptop into Windows and the network card works just fine and they don't see any ring errors. Reboot into linux, and suddenly they start seeing ring errors. I don't really grok token ring, so I'm not entirely certain that I know exactly what the problem is. But, whenever I brought the token ring on line under linux, they saw ring errors, which eventually (as I understand it) would bring down the entire ring. Switch cards (same model) and it continues to happen. It looked to me (and the network analysts) that the Linux driver was causing the problem.

I tried switching to an IBM token ring card, but there's a bug and I hadn't patched for this. The people with the fluke would not wait around while I tried to figure this out. I didn't have any other token ring cards that I could try.

In the end, I agreed not to boot into Linux unless I went into the conference room (which is one of the only rooms in the building with ethernet ports). How should I have done this differently so that using Linux would have been a more positive experience for my company?"

Comments

oh really !

[johnjones]

come on sort it

thats the sort of FUD that gets alot of people angry

LOTS of people (and by this I mean end users) have used token ring drivers with complete success

the poster knew this

so what are they looking for ?
help with their card and hardware ?
(which it seems is the problem)
info needed

kernel version
card ID
machine ID
and maybe a trace of the network

to say IT DONT WORK is cave man like in the extream even kids as young as 7 know that to fix something that you cant see you need to have it described

regards

john jones

p.s. what kind of editor runs this ?

Joining the Zealots

[_Sprocket_]

Oh please.

And then an informed reader would point out that the driver was provided by the manufactorer, not Microsoft. Thus, Microsoft itself would have little direct involvement in this case.

A more reasonable Open Source advocate might chip in that an open source driver would provide a faster path to hunting down and fixing the problem (Source is available for this driver, though I don't know what the license is - so that point may or may not be tested in this case).

There is mindless zealotry all over the tech industry, media, and public forumns. It goes far beyond Slashdot and Linux. Please try to refrain from adding to it.

I've seen this before, but not with Linux

[GC]

My last company used to have a Token Ring network. THey had the same problem if an IBM PS/2 was brought up on the network at 4Mbps and not 16Mbps. In short it would bring down the entire network.

I did not view this as a PC problem, but an inherrent problem with Token Ring, so I moved that the company should migrate to Fast Ethernet, and low and behold they did.

That was the end of that particular problem.