ISA NIC Installation 1

[apparition]

I am having trouble installing a 3Com ISA NIC on my 486 computer running Red Hat 7.0. I installed the driver module but I don't have a GUI so (i think) I can't use netcfg. I'm kinda lost. All the walkthroughs I have found don't offer an alternative to netcfg. I don't know if it should auto detect and bring up eth0 at boot or what.

So does anyone know what files I would need to modify and how to modify them?

Also, does anyone know of the ISA card problems that I might run into?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

I can't check right now but I believe you can use netcfg from console. Or use linuxconf instead. The console versions are graphical in the ncurses sense.

Ordinarily, you would put an alias with the module name into the file /etc/modules.conf . For example, 'alias eth0 tulip' would load a module called tulip when the eth0 interface was referenced. Of course you could load manually using either '/sbin/modprobe modulename' or '/sbin/insmod modulename'. This all assumes that the module is found somehere underneath the /lib/modules/2.x.x/ tree (where 2.x.x is your active kernel version) and the modules dependencies are up to date - do 'depmod -ae' for this.

One of the easiest ways to edit a file from the console is to invoke the midnight commander file manager with 'mc' , nagivate to the file you want, and edit with F4.

Rgds.

 

[apparition]

Thanks for your help.

I added the alias line to modules.conf but when I type /etc/rc.d/init.d/network start" it only brings up lo not eth0.

When I reboot, the module for the NIC is not listed (lsmod).

What am I missing here?

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

You didn't say exactly what card it was but it seems that some 3com isa cards need to first be activated with ISA p-n-p support before it will work.

See -->

http://www.scyld.com/network/3c515.html

.

Regards

 

[apparition]

ifincham, thank you for your help. I have a 3c509B-TPO and a 3c509TP. I haven't had any luck with either yet.

From what I've read so far, the red hat hardware site says to use the DOS tools to configure the irq and stuff and to disable the PnP on the card. I tried to use the "tools" from the 3com site and it gives an error that says the NIC settings cannot be detected.

Oh well, I'm not too worried about it. I'll spend some time on it later when I have nothing better to do.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[Clived]

Hello

For all you newbies, ISA-PNP support in the 2.4.x kernels is excellent, and will solve most of your problems, re cards and modems not being recognized. So off you go and re-compile new kernels with isa-pnp support .. *grin*

There is a really good newbie kernel upgrade document at jgo.local.net/LinuxGuide.
Its a two pager and easy reading

My two bits

 

[stratcat]

Is it a 3c509? If so, get the M$DOS based configurator from
3Com and set the card for NON-PNP, port 300, IRQ 10.
Then in LinuxConf, add those parameters to the NIC.
The 509s were early PNP that didn't always work as
advertised.
Good luck!

 

[apparition]

I used the DOS tools to try and configure the card but it says that the configuration for the card cannot be detected. It gives me no options after that.

Any ideas why that might happen?
I made sure the card was securely in the slot and tried it in another slot with no luck.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,





Seems the 3c509B-T is one of those NICs that is a little difficult to set up. Have you tried turning off 'pnp operating system' in you PC bios ? Perversely enough, this can sometimes hinder autodetection.The only driver for that card seems to be the 3c509. Try this in your /etc/modules.conf or /etc/conf.modules file :



alias eth0 3c509

options 3c509 xcvr=3 irq=10



If you need a different i/o address then it can only be set via a lilo parameter because that particular module doesn't support it as a parameter. The lilo parm would be like this :



ether=10,0x310,3,0x3c509,eth0



As stratcat says, according to what I've seen you should be able to use 3Com's set-up tools to disable pnp on this card anyway - if they don't work maybe the card itself has a problem...



Rgds