Problem with Etherpower 2 and 2.2.x Kernels

Wolfgang Kueter wolfgang@shconnect.de
Sun Aug 22 09:25:17 1999


Hello,

I might bore this list with this, since I found looking around in the
news that other people seem to have similar problems, but so far I've
not found a solution in the news.

I'm using the Etherpower 2 cards in several machines and never had any
problems with them with the older Kernels (2.0.36). 

Some weeks ago I bought a new machine for use as a workstation here,
plugged an Etherpower 2 card into it, installed Linux from the SuSE 6.1
Distrubution (Kernel 2.2.5). The card never worked properly. 

Though the boot messages look normal (setting up interface eth0) etc. it
sometimes takes minutes after a reboot to get the interface is working
normally. After a reboot the interface just doesn't seem to exist. Pings
result in 100% package loss.

When I look at the routing table with  

netstat -r 

it takes several minutes to show the routing table. After that the
interface is up.

Yesterday I installed the new SuSE 6.2 distribution (Kernel 2.2.10) just
to have the same the problem

With Red Hat 6.0 (Kernel 2.2.5) I never even got the card to work, the
same with self compiled kernels (2.2.5 or 2.2.10). I did not compile the
driver as a module but included it static. I know that the driver seems
to be incomplete still, because you are only asked to select in in the
2.2.x kernel configuration, after activating "prompt for incomplete
drivers".

As the machine also is needed occaisionally for some office work, win98
is also installed. No network problems with win98, the card is running
normally.

The mainboard is a Model MS-6160, CPU a celeron 466.

Just to test this I also installed Linux from the SuSE 6.2 on an old
machine which was lying around here to face the same situation. The old
machine has an Asus Board P55TP4N and a Pentium 100 CPU. Just Linux
installed, no other OS.

Any tips or solutions will be appreciated.

kind regards Wolfgang
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