2 PCI NIC´s won´t start 1

[Nostradamus]

Red hat 7.0

Had one 3com NIC in the machine. worked fine.
added a realtek NIC, and none of them will work.

I tried to load the modules with modprobe and recieved...
eth0 delayed initialation or something similar.

Could there be some hardware conflict?
Neither card show up in /proc/interrupts

ideas anyone? /Sören

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Have you got 'plug and play OS' set to yes in the PC's bios ? If so, turn it to 'no' to get the bios to configure devices rather than defer it the operating system.

If that makes no difference I'd guess you are trying the wrong device driver modules for the realtek card - there seem to be a few of these depending on the chipset. Try something like this in your /etc/modules.conf

alias eth0 3c503 (e.g. 3c503 is 3Com driver)
alias eth1 rtl8139 (e.g. rtl8139 is Realtek driver)
#options 3c503 io=0x280 (try without this first)
#options rtl8139 io=0x350 (try without this first)
pre-install rtl8139 insmod 3c503 (to force 3c503 to be loaded first)

Hope this helps..

 

[Nostradamus]

I also thought that plug and play bios was set to yes.
It´s disabled.

I´m almost 100% certain that I use the right modules.
The cards are...
realtek 8139. I use module rtl8139
3com 905b. I use module 3c90x

When configuring network/NIC:s through netconf, what changes/which files are really manipulated?

I like doing stuff manually instead of some graphic
interface that does stuff behind my back.

can insmod be used to force a certain card to be eth0 instead of eth1?

If I were to have a hardware conflict. Where would that show? What kind of error message should I recieve and where?

I´ll rush home later on and start testing this out.
/Sören

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Netcfg /linuxconf alters some of the config files read by the network initialisation scripts - e.g. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (holds variables like ip address etc). However, I don't think it holds any module related data. The standard place is the file /etc/modules.conf. You have an 'alias' entry for a device that specifies which driver to load when that device is referenced...

alias eth0 3c90x ('insmod 3c90x' on reference to eth0)
alias eth1 rtl8139 ('insmod rtl8139' on reference to eth1)
# pre-install 3c90x insmod rtl8139 (optionally this can be used to control the order that modules are loaded into memory)

What driver messages do you get in the /var/log/dmesg file ?
Also what does 'cat /proc/net/dev' say ?

Rgds

 

[Nostradamus]

I don´t recieve any messages in /var/log/dmesg regarding the eth0 or eth1 devices. Tcp/ip seems to functionn all right.

The /proc/net/dev contains only the lo device.
Some packets sent and recieved.
What are the purpose of that file? To see the amount of data transmitted?

This is the complete message recieved when trying
modprobe 3c90x

/lib/modules/2.2.16-22/net/3c90x.o: init_module: Device or recourse busy. HINT: Insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
/lib/modules/2.2.16-22/net/3c90x.o: Insmod 3c90x failed.

Do you think that parameters to kernel (through lilo) would help? setting io and irq I mean.

Now I´ll rip the realtek card out and see what happens. /Sören

 

[Nostradamus]

Strangely everything booted up just fine when I removed the realtek card.
I inserted an old 3com 900 card and configured that and the other 3com successfully.

Was the Realtek card broken?
I don´t want anything to do with it anyway. /Sören

 

[marsd]

Broken , or not willing to play nice with irqs anyway...

Congrats.

 

[KenShackelford]

Nostradamus, I had a similar experience with putting two D-Link cards (Realtek) into a server running RH 7.0. I had the same error message that you got. I got around this problem by compiling a new rtl3189.o driver. If you look at the driver diskette that should have come with your card, you will see the C source code along with, I believe, the compiler command needed to generate the new driver. Once I compiled the driver under RH 7.0, the resulting module worked fine. I did note that the size of the resulting module was different from the pre-existing module. You might try this and see if it makes a difference for you. It did for me.

 

[Nostradamus]

Thanks. I´ll keep that in mind.
Still sounds strange that the first 3com card wouldn´t load as long as the realtek card was in the machine.
I think I´ll hang on to these two 3com´s for now.
I´m curious about the new module though. I´ll check the diskette when I get home. /Sören