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)??

Thanks and regards

get rid of the cards, even Dlink admitted that they are bad and stopped production

I have 2 of these cards in use and have had no problems with them in 18 months or so (yet ...) when they stop working do you have to reboot the router?

Thanks

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.

/Guan

Is there any alternative to this DFE-580 ( i need a 4 port card)??

Pity, it looks like a nice card on paper at least (I haven't used one myself).

Why don't you grab a RouterBOARD 44; it's made by the same guys who brought you RouterOS so I doubt you could go wrong with that.