[ale] Time to go ISA NIC Hunting

BruceG griffisb at bellsouth.net
Sat Oct 4 02:38:53 EDT 2003


Decided to put together an old box to work as a print server. Happily 
installed Debian Woody. No X, no window manager, just a plain text machine. 
Selected print server from tasksel and configured away. Also added parport 
and ethernet support.

The person I got the box from thought it had a Linksys Ether16 Combo card in 
it. No amount of hacking got the card to work, although it did seem to want 
to be a ne2000 clone. I finally was able to do a modprobe ne io=0x240, 
irq=10. The card installed and ifconfig shows eth0. I configured ip address, 
gateway, subnet mask, dns servers, made sure it was up.

Can't ping the gateway. Can't ping any other boxes. Can ping my loopback 
address and my ethernet address. Can't ping it from other hosts. So - checked 
the mac address of the nic and looked it up. It's an Accton. Don't know the 
model. 

I DO know that it is not ISAPnP. Did a pnpdump, and got no hits. Did /cat/proc 
pci - no good. So it's an ISA card, not PCI. And NOT plug and pray. Doing a 
cat /proc/interrupts shows it using IRQ 10 with no conflicts. lsmod shows the 
card as well.

Anyone know anyplace to get a CHEAP ISA Ethernet card? I'd like to put 
together a print server, and move the shared printer off my desktop.



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