So much for product labelling

In a mild frenzy over an apparently bad network card on my file server, I ran to Fry’s the other day, and picked up a Netgear FA-311 network card to replace the presumed dead card. Bad idea. Although the box clearly states that the FA-311 works under Linux, it doesn’t. You can download an elderly natsemi driver from Netgear’s web site, and it won’t work. The PCI ID of the card appears to be totally bogus, too. Sigh. The real lesson, though, is that home-crimped network cables are fragile. The old network card was fine, as it turned out; it just took me forever to get around to suspecting the cable itself.