Topic: How to customize a NIC driver???

[John Lewis]

A friend is trying to upgrade his 5.1.2 box from dial-up to 2 nic's.  He added the 2nd nic (a netgear fa311), and the configuration manager showed the card as "unknown device".

We downloaded the fa311-0.1-3.i386.rpm from charlie brady's mirror and installed it.

I then did the following

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration set EthernetDevice2 fa311
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event console-save

Then restarted the server.

/etc/modules.conf did have an eth1 fa311 entry

Eth1 did not come up, but an "ifup eth1" did fail with "determining ip information", which it had not done before... (we are also now making sure we're getting dhcp info from the new DSL modem/line, but that's another story)

Is this the right  way to manually specify what driver to use for a nic?  Are there any other steps that are needed?

Thanks.

[sdfg]

ghj

[Tom Keiser]

If you upgrade to something like 5.6 or 6.0, you will be able to select your NIC right in the console as you do the initial setup. You will also be doing yourself a favor, by eliminating a bunch of vulnerabilities.

T.

[Charlie Brady]

John Lewis wrote:

> A friend is trying to upgrade his 5.1.2 box from dial-up to 2
> nic's.

Anyone still running 5.1.2 is taking a significant and unnecessary risk. Upgrade!

Charlie

[Krusty]

My suggestion is to get your hands on a realtek chipset or an intel pro 100 chipset as these cards are very common and will be discovered by e-smith straight away. Also these cards seem to perform to their best capabilities working under llinux. A funny driver will cause problems in your network and only frustrate yourself. For the small fee of a new network card you will be happier later.