> So, what are your recommendations:
> 
> - a Sparc-2's on-board le or a 501-2015 FSBE's lebuffer/le
> - a Sparc-10's on-board le or      ./.

Unfortunately I don't know which chipsets the sun systems have :-)
(I also got the DMA parts mixed up.  You will see DMA+ and DMA2 parts
not DMA and DMA+, there is also an NCR part that has the lance core
embedded into the same silicon.)

In general the on-board interface will give you less trouble than
the Sbus cards.

I may have overestimated the likelyhood you will have problems!
We saw most problems on systems with 4 cpu, multiple SCSI controllers
and multiple network (ethernet and fddi) cards - when running database
code that was hitting the discs....

A system acting as a router will probably never see a fifo underrun ever.

I've never seen a lance fifo error on a single cpu system.  My 'gut' feel
is that the Mbus was given priority over the Sbus on accesses into main
memory.  This will speed up disk limited benchmarks (slighty) but plays
havock with any network cards that rely on passing frames to system memory
in 'real time'.

    David