Topic: Telus & Realtec Issues

[mike mattos]

I just solved a weird problem trying to access a fixed IP using Telus DSL service.  All my cards worked in a Win98 machine, and connected to the correct fixed IP address.  

To further muddy the water, all the cards all ran the LOCALnetwork correctly when installed in the SME5.5 box!

SME55 had problems with cards using the Realtec 8139 driver,  only connected to the 10.x.x.x login server at Telus, they never registered their mac address to complete the fixed IP connection.  ( That is to say, ifconfig shows a 10.x.x.x address and it does work , but only within the Telus login subnet! NO gateway or DNS !)

I finally grabbed an old 10mb card that used the Realtec 8029 chipset and after changing the driver and rebooting, the correct fixed IP address was obtained.

Further research suggests that the LINUX driver for the 8139 chipset has been patched a few times, and I suspect with the latest 8139c version there is still a problem!

[Robert]

Have a look at http://www.scyld.com/network/rtl8139.html. This is Donald Becker's page about his rtl8139 driver. Donald has some harsh words for the 8139too driver that's been included with Red Hat's 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. He's basically saying the 8139too driver is a bad rip-off of his rtl8139 driver. I too had some serious problems with the 8139too driver on my system (an Alpha with a 2.2.19 kernel). Loading the driver caused the entire system to hang! After compiling and installing the rtl8139 driver, I haven't had any problems with my RTL8139C card. I made an rpm for this driver and made it available as an erratum package for users of the SME/Alpha V5.5 distribution. The advisory for this erratum package has a link to the source rpm, which you could rebuild on x86 if you want to give the rtl8139 driver a try. The advisory is at http://www.robert2.dds.nl/errata/SABA-2003-001.html. My email address is somewhere on the same site as the advisory, if you need any help.