This is almost surely not Debian specific, but there is
not USENET feed here in Ireland that I'd have access to,
so please bear with me.
I am trying to Ethernet-connect two i386, a P133+AsusPT4XE
and a K6-2/300+AsusP5A. The former has been tried with
Debian 2.0r1,r3 and some slink snapshots, various
kernels 2.0.33/34/36 and 2.1.129, the latter 2.0r1
and 2.0.34.
The boards in question are 16bit ISA SMC Ultra,
Combo featuring BNC, RJ, and 15pin AUI. No ROM
on board, jumper setting 3 to set I/O 0x300, IRQ10,
RAM 0xCC00, ROM none. The chipset is SMC UltraChip
83C790QF, the board has a (C) 1993 label, a Rev A
imprint, and numerous other numbers and labels.
This will get lengthy, so if you do not know this
particular combination, maybe you want to bail out
now.
--------------------------------------------------------
I got
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resource temporarily unavailable
SIOCADDRT: Network is unreacheable
until I did the RTFM with the Ethernet HOWTO. I got
into the PCI/PNP BIOS on both machines and enabled ISA
Shared Memory, with a CC00 base and a 16K size, and
that problem was fixed.
I checked /proc/interupts and /proc/ioports for
collisions, flagged IRQ10 as "Used by ISA" in the BIOS,
and put the following in /etc/conf.modules:
alias eth0 smc-ultra
options eth0 irq=10 io=0x300
dmesg gives:
eth0: SMC Ultra at 0x300, 00 00 C0 AF 88 C3, IRQ 10 memory 0xcc000-0xcffff
lsmod gives:
Module Pages Used by
smc-ultra 1 1
8390 2 [smc-ultra] 0
Now, ifconfig -i gives me (after some ping etc.)
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:C0:AF:88:C3
inet addr:192.168.1.1 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:203 errors:121 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:242
Collisions:1936
Interrupt:10 Base address:0x310 Memory:cc000-d0000
Note the different base address: that again is allegedly
okay for SMC cards with 8390, which have an offset. In
/proc/ioport I find:
0300-031f : SMC Ultra
and in /proc/interrupt I see:
10: 375 SMC Ultra
The assigned IRQ is indeed used, I guess.
My routing table looks like this:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
localnet * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 2 eth0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 2 lo
default * 0.0.0.0 U 1 0 13 eth0
I tried both a twisted pair board-to-board and a BNC.
The cat5 and the terminators, T's and cable have been
tested and checked in another LAN. Module or builtin,
changed routing tables, no matter what I tried, I just
keep piling up TX errors, and don't even get a Network
unreacheable or other response. WinNT gives me a ping
timeout when trying to reach the Linux box.
I had networking set up a couple of times earlier, I
think I even used one of the boards before, maybe
even with Debian 1.3.1. If anybody has an idea of what
I am doing wrong, please drop me a line. I have been
told that SMC Combo cards might cause trouble, does
anybody know this particular variety?
b.
