Yesterday, I received a PWS 600au (thank you, you know who you are).
It seems to work fine...mostly. :)

The onboard Ethernet - tlp0 - doesn't work right.  The person who sent
it to me installed 3.0 (basically straight off the CD, accept all the
defaults); it boots OK, but when I try to use the Ethernet, I have
trouble.  I get "tlp0: transmit timeout", and then it starts jabbering,
or something like it - I had it connected to a hub, and the collision
light on the hub went on solid, but other machines on the hub saw no
traffic at all.  But it's not just fried hardware, because if I tell it
to netboot, it gets all the way through to starting the kernel.  (It
doesn't *work*, because the alpha netboot setup I have has a kernel not
compatible with this machine, but the network works far enough to get
the kernel loaded, without going wonky.)

tlp0 is reported (by the 3.0 kernel) as

tlp0 at pci0 dev 3 function 0: DECchip 21143 Ethernet, pass 3.0
tlp0: interrupting at dec 550 irq 0
tlp0: DEC, Ethernet address 00:00:f8:76:58:a1
nsphy0 at tlp0 phy 5: DP83840 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
nsphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
tlp0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 10base2, 10base5

Any thoughts?  Or is this something I'll just have to live with until I
get something newer (3.1, 4.0, current, whatever) on it?  I currently
have it networked with SLIP, but even at 115200, that's only about 1%
of an Ethernet.  (Amusingly, the machine also has a gigabit interface
in it - it can do 1000Mb and .1Mb but nothing in between.
Unfortunately the gigabit card (a) does nothing slower than gigabit and
(b) is glass rather than copper; I have nothing else gigabit-capable
and only a bare handful of fiber interfaces of any sort.  I'm going to
try to find another interface that won't give SRM indigestion, but I'd
rather use the onboard if I can.)

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