On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 08:58:28PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:

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On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 06:08:30PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:

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I'm puzzled! Can someone give me a hint?

I've had an (ancient) NE2000 clone which plugs into an ISA (not PCI) slot running happily on a very old machine (ca 1995) for years.

On SuSe 5.2 I had it set up to use module ne.o, with options "io=0x300".

Now that machine's PSU has failed, so I moved the hard drives etc. to another box (of more recent vintage ... ).

Now it fails to find the card and/or any IRQ line when given 0x300.

I've removed all other ISA cards from that box to make sure there are no conflicts.

I've tried this not only with the "native "SuSE-5.2 off the hard drive, but also booting with tomsrtbt ("Linux on a Floppy" and with Ubuntu live CDs, in all cases without success.

I'm puzzled that it works one the one box but (with the same system and settings) fails on another. Is there a possibility that ISA IO addresses and IRQs can change between different motherboards?

A lot of the NE2000 clones were actually ISA Plug'n'Play (aka Plug'n'Pray). These could well change IRQ/IO if moved between motherboards. However I thought that the drivers these days would perform the appropriate PNP query/setup to automatically configure the device. What kernel version are you using and is it self compiled or distribution provided?

Another option is that if the IRQ is hardwired on the card you may need to reserve it in the BIOS settings so that no PCI device is assigned the same one.

As a final suggestion, some cards had a vendor supplied tool which would allow you to change/view the card settings. nictools-nopci under Debian has Linux tools for some cards, but I suspect for a cheap clone you're going to end up with a DOS tool.

Is there a reason not to move to a cheap PCI card? (The only reason I can think not to is that 10base2 PCI cards are harder to get hold of, but they do exist.)

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I'm in a bit of a bind, because I want to keep the distribution (SuSE-5.2 from 1998) and don't want to upgrade (heavily customised over the years, and grown to fit the user like a pair of very old boots; not forgetting the huge archive of stuff).

This rules out changing to a PCI card - I have a few 2Com 905B's, and they work fine on the second motherboard when I boot from tomsrtbt or a Live CD, but the 3c95x driver on the SuSE distro won't cut it, for some reason (it's version 0.98 of 3c95x.o).

So that's why I'm keen to stick with the "NE 2000", since I know it cam work with that distro.

Your comments about P'nP etc. much appreciated. The kernel is 2.0.33, and is the stock kernel for that distro. I haven't done anything with it. I see there is source code for version 0.99 of 3c59x.c, so maybe I'll have a try at compiling that.

Yick. You want something much more recent in terms of kernel versions to do PNP sensibly. With 2.0.x you're going to have to investigate isapnptools and I thankfully recycled the neurons that dealt with that years ago.

I strongly encourage you to consider something a bit less than 9 years old...

J.

On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 09:26:25PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:

I'd be a lot more willing to do that, if it wasn't in the same league as replacing the soil in which a garden of irreplaceable plants was growing ... Ted.

I'd look at getting a new machine and putting something recent on it and then looking at getting the old system copied across into some kind of virtual machine so that you have access to the old and can migrate it over to the new a little bit at a time.

adam

On Saturday 26 May 2007 23:01, Ted Harding wrote:

PS Of course the ideal would be to replace the PSU on the old machine -- but they don't make then like that any more ...

Well... If that's *all* you need, I've got a couple of old XT power supplies knocking around (the type with a real on/off switch)..

I'll bung it my bag for the next pubmeet unless you need one sooner.

Regards, Paul.

On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 11:01:23PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:

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On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 09:26:25PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:

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I'd be a lot more willing to do that, if it wasn't in the same league as replacing the soil in which a garden of irreplaceable plants was growing ... Ted.

I'd look at getting a new machine and putting something recent on it and then looking at getting the old system copied across into some kind of virtual machine so that you have access to the old and can migrate it over to the new a little bit at a time.

adam

Yes, that would be the long-term solution. But, meanwhile, I need to be using that machine constantly (over nmy LAN), so am looking for an immediate fix to the NIC problem.

I'm getting sort of somewhere with the idea of probing for IRQs. The 'ne' driver finds the card at 0x300, but can;t find an IRQ. So I can set options to give it a trial IRQ (3,4 and 7 seem to be taken by Serial0, Serial1 and Parallel0), so I've tried the others in the low range. For most, the driver finds the card at ox300 and is "using IRQ 5" (e.g.); and Linux then sets up the eth0 interface as verified by ifconfig, and also the routing tables (including the correct default route). But nothing gets out of the card (e.g. I ping another og my machines, all packets are lost, and no lights blink).

But "sort of somwhere" isn't *there*!

Thanks for the continued suggestions. Ted.

PS Of course the ideal would be to replace the PSU on the old machine -- but they don't make then like that any more ...

I have some old ISA NICs still I think, might a different card possibly help, I can drop one in the post (or are you near Ipswich).

I also have a couple of old AT style PSUs still I think, might one of these help you out?