[ale] netcfg

Chris Ricker kaboom at gatech.edu
Fri Nov 27 12:44:13 EST 1998


On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Vernard Martin wrote:

> > > Regarding "The lesson learned is do not use ISA NICs on a mobo that
> > > contains PCI slots. Use PCI NICs only." - What's the story here?  Can
> 
> We were trying to get one PCI slot and one ISA slot card to work together so
> that we could multi-home it. When we switched to 2 PCI cards, it worked with no
> problem. The RedHAt install even recognized them both on installation.

That should still work, at least in general (It's worked for me; I suppose
it might not w/ whatever two cards you were trying, though).  You'll just
have to pass a lilo option to the kernel to get it to probe for the second
card.  By default, Linux probes for only one card.  If both cards are PCI,
it's going to find both automagically b/c of the way PCI works (eg, you
query the bus and get a listing of all the devices on it, instead of blindly
tickling base addresses to see what exactly's there like with ISA). If one's
not PCI, or possibly even if they use different kernel drivers and are both
PCI, though, it's going to quit after the first.

Something like

kernel ether=irq,io,etho ether=irq,io,eth1

at the lilo prompt will force it to probe both.  Also, for ISA you can force
the order of the cards (eg, if you switch which is eth0 and which is eth1 at
the prompt, it'll switch in the kernel).  With PCI, however, no matter what
order you specify, it's going to ignore that and go by slot order and /or
base address (I've not figured out which).

On a slightly related subject, does anyone know Solaris / Intel very well?
One of my machines is a dual-boot system with NT 4, 95, Linux, FreeBSD 3.0,
and Solaris 2.7 on it.  When I switched that box from a 3c509 to a 3c905b,
solaris absolutely refused to link the new driver into the kernel.  After
trying all the usual tricks, I talked to a Sun engineer who said it was a
known bug and that I'd have to re-install.  Needless to say, I wasn't happy
since Solaris x86's fdisk is approximately the world's dumbest piece of
software--to reinstall, you have to delete the solaris partition *and* any
partitions after it on the disk (in my case, this meant I had to reinstall
BSD too).  At any rate, I backed up everything, did the reinstall, and
restored BSD, and now all are working with the new card.  My question is,
has anyone else experienced that problem with Solaris 7?  It's not really a
bug that makes sense (it can link in some driver modules, but not others,
but then on a reinstall can link in that exact same other module?  C'mon,
Sun.  Even SCO's not *that* stupid.), so I'm not sure if the engineer just
told me that to get me to go away, or what....

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                            kaboom at gatech.edu
                                               chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu






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