Capture problems with Intel quad cards?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:35 AM, John A. Kilpatrick <john at hypergeek.net> wrote:
>
> Has anyone had problems with using current Intel quad ethernet cards for
> packet capture?  As a proof-of-concept test we bought an Intel PWLA8494GT
> and hooked it up to some Network Critical taps.  There was a very strange
> issue with corruption of the captured packets.  The *only* issue (but it's a
> big one) is that the source IP on some captured packets is munged.  As far
> as I can tell that's the *only* issue with the packet captures - no other
> data is corrupted.

Dumb question...  It sounds like you've only used the card in packet
capture mode (i.e. promiscuous mode). Have you tried testing the card
just for normal host-to-host network flows?  Maybe you have a bad
card?

If you still see problems on host-host flows, it's more likely to be a
bad card rather then a bad driver.  (Given that a driver that can't
handle host-host flows is going to be obvious pretty quickly.)

Good Luck,
Bill Bogstad