Topic: NIC Installation Problems

[Keely]

I am absolutely at my wits end. I am trying to install e-smith on a P66 and have tried a number of different NIC's, none of which have been identified by e-smith. Most of the NIC's on the compatible list aren't available in my area or are 4x the price of those that are. Currently, I'm trying the Netgear FA311. I read an earlier post where a user had to manually copy fa311.0 into the appropriate folder and issue the config command to have them take. I figured that would do the trick for me. However, I still can't get internet access nor can I access the e-smith box from another computer on the network. I can only assume that they haven't installed properly. I have run ifconfig and gotten only the following results:

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
EtherTalk Phase 2 addr:0/0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:3924 Metric:1
RX packets:7070 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7070 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0

Does this mean that the Netgear cards haven't taken? What else can I do? I'm ready to give up on e-smith, please help.

[Kees Blokland]

Hi Keely,

I think your problem has little to do with e-smith. If your card is not detected by the bios of your motherboard, than nothing will ever happen. Since you are using a P66, you have a old motherboard I'd guess. Try to tell us more about it ( type/make/ etc) Maybe someone will remember something that will help you.

My first step would be to look in the bios to see if there is anything that resets the allocation of irq's. During boot up, some bioses do show what hardware has been assigned what irq.

If all else fails, try to do a window9x install and see if the card gets detected. If so, note the irq's etc. E-smith is really a Redhat distribution, so the hardware detection has nothing to do with e-smith. If Redat can't find it, it means it ain't there, for whatever reason..

Go back to the very basis basics and start from there..
Do describe your hardware in some more detail, please?

good luck

kees

[Adam Scott]

Are you trying to use new(ish) NICs in this old system? Network cards produced in the last few years tend to be software configurable rather than needing you to set jumpers on the card itself. This is good in most cases but can confuse Linux type systems. Maybe see if you have a disk with some software 'setup' type program that lets you alter the card's parameters; it may well be set to 'plug and play' type operation which is most unlikely to work on an old motherboard. However e-smith only seems to like newish PCI type cards that prefer P&P installation. This is a real problem with older cards! I had a good old 3COM ISA card running nicely in a RedHat 6.0 system that really fouled up my new e-smith installation ...

[Keely]

Hi Kees and Adam:

Thanks for the input. Following some other suggestions I got, I ended up trying a couple of 3Com 905C's and they worked like a charm. I had tried installing those other cheaper cards with PnP both enabled and not, and it had no effect. These cards went in without a problem with PnP disabled.

Now, if I could just connect to the internet, but that's a topic for another thread...

Thanks again, guys.