Problem with 3c905 and Mandrake 6.1

rick ochoa rick@nervous.net
Wed Dec 22 15:26:36 1999


I recently switched from LinuxPPC -- decided to take all the hardware
along with it. Had a system that worked with 2 nic's, both 3c905x. they
worked fine until I put them in the SMP Intel box. The machine would time
out trying to initialize the cards (no messages, no oops) and would become
unresponsive. Had to restart the machine over and over again. Ich.

Found the 3com utilities on disk 2 of the driver software (check their
website) and -- this is a trip -- it didn't recognize either of the cards.

Switched the slots, recompiled the kernel (for support of my HPT 366) and
it worked. Turned out the IRQ of the HPT sat on the same ones the 3coms
and Something Was Rotten.

Long story short -- it is probably still an IRQ conflict. I had the same
symptoms, except I also got a 'resource temporarily unavailable' error.

On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Matthew Hill wrote:

> Followup:
> 
> I have the alias for eth0 set in /etc/conf.modules to 3c59x.
> I tried to eliminate the IRQ sharing for the3c905  as I'd heard that some
> PCI NICs don't particularly share well. It didn't to make a difference. I am still unable to transmit or receive, though the card
> initializes okay and is reported as okay (with correct IRQ, MAC, I/O with ifconfig -a
> 
> What else can I try?
>  Outside of replacing the NIC with an old ISA, I've run out of ideas...HELP!
> 
> TIA
> Matt
>     -----Original Message-----
>     From: Matthew Hill <matthill@home.com>
>     To: linux-vortex@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov <linux-vortex@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov>
>     Date: Monday, December 20, 1999 11:28 AM
>     Subject: Problem with 3c905 and Mandrake 6.1
>     
>     
>     Hi,
> 
>     I recently installed Mandrake 6.1 as another bootable OS on my Celeron based
> 
>     system. I also have NT 4 and Win98 operating on the same system using the
> 
>     installed 3c905 board.
> 
>     I am unable to get the 3c905 to access the network under Mandrake. I have
> 
>     rebuilt the kernel and tried both the original 3c59x driver as well as the
> 
>     3com 3c90x driver both loading as modules.
> 
>     The system seems to prefer the 3c59x driver as it initializes the board fine
> 
>     and ifconfig reports eth0 as okay (using IRQ 9 ).
> 
>     I currently have the option debug=1 set. When I attempt to ping a local
> 
>     linux box there is no response and a message "transmit timed out tx_status
> 
>     00 status e000" is reported.
> 
>     Any help or suggestions are welcome. I'm currently considering juggling IRQs
> 
>     used by the PCI bus as IRQ 9 is also used by another device (there were no
> 
>     sharing complaints so I assumed they both would behave).
> 
>     thanks,
> 
>     Matt
> 
>     matthill@home.com <mailto:matthill@home.com>
> 
> 
> 
>