Fixing linux network problem with https sites

For years, I kept encountering problems with https sites with various networking hardwares working in linux. Just to name a few, yahoo mail, my company's remote access using a secure https access with citrix client & the https secure online banking facility from Maybank2u.

The problems lies with the various linux nic drivers that is mixed & matched between different hardwares chipsets. The details is as follow:

I'm using a SIS190 onboard NIC from my flashy & new motherboard. And the default 2.6.11 kernel in Fedora Core 4 simply does not know & support this SIS190 network card. To solve that, I plug in a S$1 SMC network card & the machine is immediately up & alive. With that, I managed to live-update FC4's kernel to 2.6.14.1 & viola, the new kernel regconised the sis190 lan chip. Upon removing the SMC network card & rebooting, the SIS190 nic seemed to work fine. However, I kept having problem with connection to any https sites, from yahoo to Maybank2u sites. No amount of tweaking with linux's firewall or selinux helps. Even doing a self-compiled 2.6.14.4 kernel does not help, although it works with any non-https sites.

Today, I finally took the plunge & downloaded the SIS190 driver, from no other than the manufacturer SIS Taiwan instead. I unzipped the sis190.c file into

/usr/src/linux-2.6.14.4/drivers/net

overwriting the sis190.c driver obtained from www.kernel.org.

So I recompiled the whole kernel with the above & upon reboot, viola, all the https sites are working fine now.

This conclude that, the problem lies in the default sis190.c driver in the public kernel. The sis190.c driver from www.sis.com.tw works fine. Now that I recalled, I had similar problem with a Intel onboard lan chip years back, presumably the problem is the same. A problem with mixing & matching of lan chip drivers naming vs the actualy chipset used.