Chuma Agbodike wrote in a message to All:
 CA> I am alarmed by what recently happened to my 2 station network. 
 CA> I had a 486 DX2/66 running Win95 & WinNT work station And Win 
 CA> NT server 4.0 running on another 486. Both linked by RG 58 A/U 
 CA> cable. They hardly failed over the NE2000 compatible ethernet 
 CA> card. 
 CA> I then replaced the workstation Mother Booard with an AMD 
 CA> K6-166 based MBd. After that I could not log on to the network. 
 CA> Just Locally.
 CA> What alarmed me was that The SERVER would freeze after a while. 
 CA> And nothing but a reset would do. I never touched the server. I 
 CA> just noticed that the screen saver was not working.
 CA> I finally fixed the inabibility to logging onto the network by 
 CA> changing the IRQ for the NE2000 card to Legacy ISA instead of 
 CA> PCI/ISA. And the freezing of the server stopped. Which means 
 CA> that the errant NE2000 in the worksattion froze the server.
 CA> I can't imagine how something like this will impact a bigger 
 CA> network in an office department. How do you fellows on large 
 CA> networks stop something like this from bringing down your 
 CA> SERIOUS networks.??
First of all, you should understand that one does not use NE-2000 cards in 
"serious" network servers.  These cards are perfectly appropriate for home 
use or light-duty servers, but you should not use them in busy servers 
because their design imposes a load on the main CPU.  Like using SCSI instead 
of IDE in a server, a better network card has more intelligence built onto it 
so that the main CPU can be left free to do other useful work.  Of course, if 
you have an operating system such as Windows 95 where the CPU would not do 
useful work even if free to do so, this makes no difference.
Most likely, the card was being automatically assigned an IRQ in PCI mode 
which was already used for something else, creating a conflict.  This is one 
reason we try to keep all non-PCI cards out of PCI servers.  You have to 
diagnose this problem and set the PCI IRQ pool manually in CMOS setup.
Finally, NT is not the most stable of operating systems, regardless of what 
people say about it.  If you have a heterogeneous network with Unix and other 
things running on the LAN, then it is not unusual to see NT get confused and 
lock up every so often.  Microsoft constantly releases fixes and patches for 
these kinds of problems as they discover them, so it is essential to see that 
NT is maintained with current service packs applied.  It is trivially easy to 
hang an NT Server machine from across the wire, and there are programs such 
as "WinNuke" widely circulated on the Internet to do so.
 
-- Mike
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