I having strange probs with this card, i’ve got 3 of them and they all having the same probs. 2 ports are bound to NATted internal private nets and 2 is bound to public addresses. The 2 public ports stops working in a random pattern. it can work for a hour or a month!
I have never had any probs with the 2 natted ports.
I also have a 5th port in my system (RTL8139) connected to our ISP and that also always works fine
Is this a problem with the design of the card??
Is there any alternative to this DFE-580 ( i need a 4 port card)??
it looks like this card has unstable PCI bus connection, which will hang your PCI bus after some time under high load. i am not sure if watchdog will be able to help you, you can try it… but the best solution is just through it away. use RouterBOARD or Intel multiport cards - they are stable.
It is only 1 of the ports (at a time)that suddenly dies. We have tried to duplicate the problem by putting high load on all ports, but without any luck. The problem is random. Using watchdog has helped us a lot by minimizing downtime on the most important port.
