Topic: Network cards

[Scott]

Hello all I've installed SME 5.0 and can't seem to get the NIC's working correctly. System config is as follows:
PII-400
256mb RAM
3c905b NICs
Adaptec 2940U2W
IBM 18gb SCSI

I had it working under e-smith 4.0 and just installed 5.0 on a new drive.
When it comes up everything looks fine, but the NIC's don't respond to ping req. or anything else.

ifconfig shows:
eth0 as IRQ=16
and
eth1 as IRQ=17

I'm not sure why this is happening or how to make them be a real IRQ.

Any Ideas why this might be happening or how to fix it??

Cheers,

[Scott]

When I look in Dmesg I found this:

enabling IO-APIC IRQs
init IO-APIC IRQs
     IO-APIC (apicid-pin) 2-0, 2-18, 2-19, 2-20, 2-21, 2-22, 2-23 not connected
number of MP IRQ Sources: 21
number of IO-APIC #2 registers: 24

does this have anything to do with it?

[Scott Taylor]

Hello,
  After further research I believe this has something to do with the fact that the board in the server is Multi-processor capable. I'm only using one of the processors. It seems the NIC's won't work quite right under the IO-APIC IRQ mapping. Is there a way I can turn smp or IO-APIC mapping off? When I install e-smith it doesn't give me a choice of using smp or not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Scott

[Scott]

Ok,
  I've figured out how to get by the smp kernel. If anyone didn't know when installed SME gives you a smp-kernel image and a non-smp-kernel image. So upon boot you can choose one or the other and make which ever default by editing the lilo.conf file and editing the default image to load on boot.

Thus my irq's are good. But eth0 is still using the same IRQ as my SCSI controller. And I still can't ping either NIC's IP address. I downed both NIC's and brought up just eth1 and still no ping.

Any Ideas where I'm going wrong? Again both NIC's are 3c905b's.

Cheers,
and thanks,

Scott

[Scott]

Reinstalled first boot after install chose the non-smp image everything worked..................go figure

[Paul Chubb]

Hi,
     I had the same or similar problems under 4.0 and 4.1. My report and workaround below. Don't know if it helps....

I have now setup both V4.0 and 4.11 and in each case I spent several hours
getting the ethernet card to work. Hardware:

Second hand digital P100 pc with 40Mb Ram, 8Gb Maxtor disk and 3com
3c905-tx 10/100 card.

E-Smith is set up as a dialup gateway.

E-Smith correctly identifies the card as needing the 3c59x driver however
on initial install and configuration E-Smith doesn't respond on the card.
Ping, DHCP lease renewal and other operations cause the activity light to
blink a number of times and then they time out.

Like most trouble shooting it gets a bit messy. I believe my workaround is
this:

1) configure E-Smith as a gated server - internal and external nic (not
necessary on 4.0)

2) save and activate the configuration

3) after reboot swap the ethernet card order - internal to external

4) save and activate the configuration

5) after reboot swap them back

6) save and activate the configuration

7) After reboot E-Smith magically starts working

configure the server as dialup.

This is a painful process on this class of machine so I haven't reproduced
it in detail. BTW everything else works great so far, I love the
improvements in 4.1.1 it has saved me a heck of work in customisation.
Thankyou

Paul Chubb