Topic: Ethernet Card Swapping

[Steve]

E-Smith is great.

We pointed a free dns server to e-smith with 3 domains. We noticed it wouldn't recognize 2 of the 3 domains we set. After checking our settings we figured a reboot was in order. When e-smith came back up, it didn't want to make an Internet connection.

From what we can tell the ethernet cards seem to get mixed up. They are both 3com 905B-TX's. We rebooted a week ago as part of our test and had to change the card config to 'swapped' before it seemed to straighten it all out.

This time when we rebooted we changed the cards back to 'normal' and that worked. Does this have anything to do with 2 of the same driver being recognized in the config? Other than the obvious choice of using a different brand of card for one of the two, is there any way to make what we already have more stable on reboot?

If we have to do a remote reboot we're dead in the water.

[Gordon Rowell]

Is "Plug and Pray" disabled in your BIOS?

Also, some people have reported that you may need to fix the 3c905B IRQs with the DOS utility on the driver disk.

Gordon

[Steve]

Good spot on the Plug and Play. I tried to disable it, but for some reason it loads AFTER the bios. I can barely remember how to get home at night much less know how to turn it off if it's not in the bios. Guess I'll have to live with it until I can figure out how to disable it.

I got this machine from TheLinuxStore a couple of years ago and it's a little quirky. There's also a funky setting somewhere with how it mounts the hard drive that caused major problems with NetMax. Luckily for me NetMax became too much of a problem and I reinvestigated e-smith.

Thanks for pointing out the BIOS possibility.