[ale] Centos 6 system on HP Pavillion - NIC chip appears to be going south - options?

[Neal Rhodes]

We've been running Centos 6 on an HP Pavillion P1 1131 for at least 4
years now with no drama.    Last couple of days have been drama. 

After doing odd-man out testing, we appear to have narrowed it down to
the onboard RTL8171EH-CG seems to conk out after a couple of hours.
Reboot, and all is well, for.... a couple of hours, then no
inbound/outbound eth0. 

Since this has been a stable server for many years, my hunch is the chip
has gone intermittent.   As such, simplest way out of the swamp is to
turn it off and stuff in a PCI x1 card. 

Any recommendations for an inexpensive no-drama PCI x1 card that works
out of the box with Centos 6? 

2nd component to this is that this HP system has a tiny little wireless
card, apparently an RT3092.   Has anyone gotten these to be recognized
on Centos 6?  an lspci -nn doesn't seem to show the chip, although I
visually have confirmed it is there.   It would be nice to have wireless
in case the DSL/uverse dies and we have to use cell phone. 

3rd - Another way of going about this would be to boot an independent
linux CD and see if the ethernet chip dies after a while.
Recommendations these days on the best on of these?   Is Knoppix still
good for this?   Anything better at diagnostics? 

Neal Rhodes
MNOP Ltd.
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