A question about PCI, IRQ and I/O address

[jeffycli]

Hi all,

I have linux box which is installed on a machine with 4 PCI slots. And I am going to install 4 network cards in it so that I can use it as a router.

During the installation of these network cards, I find those of them will not function as I installed the fourth network cards into the system.

Here are my network cards' model

1st card Realtek 8139c
2nd card Realtek 8139c (same as 1st card)
3rd card Realtek 8139c (same as 1st card)
4th card Linksys Fast Ethernet card

I have used the dignostic program supplied by the REALTEK to see what are their IRQ and I/O address.

When 4th card is not installed, I can see all the Realtek cards in the dignostic program. But When I installed the 4th card, I can only see two cards which is supposed to be three.

And then I removed one of the realtek cards, those three network cards, (2 realtek and 1 linksys), they all functions again in linux.

So is that means that I have use out all of my hardware resources (i.e. IRQ and I/O address) when I installed the 3rd network card such that the fourth network card can't get the resources?

Thank you for your attention

Best regards,
Jeff Li

 

[Comtech]

It's also possible that the motherboard you are using shares one slot with another (same resources), and thus cannot function with all 4.
Usually the first PCI slot shares it's resources with AGP (if you have it)... Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[ceh4702]

Why not just say what you are trying to do? If you did, someone else might have a suggestion.

For instance is this for incoming internet traffic from the internet, or just a router in a local network? Maybe a Linksys cable/dsl router with a firewall would work? I think it is designed to be connected between a cable/dsl Modem and 4 computers. They describe it as a wan router. Linksys switches are pretty good too. The price on the router may be a bit less than it was. They are selling this router on

http://www.amazon.com

for $69.00 after rebate; that is about half of what they use to sell for. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.