Help with ethernet and ram

[CiAsA S'Nuey Boark <ciasaboark@telocity.com>]

Hi,
   I have a couple of quick questions.  I have recently purchaced an alpha 
pws500a.  I finally managed to get debian installed on it, but I seem to be 
having trouble with the network.

   Looking throught dmesg I can see that the ethernet device is found and 
started properly, and throught ifconfig eth0 i can see that the ip/netmask 
and such are configured correctly, but i cannot ping anyone else on the 
network here.  I have a couple of different computers on a local network.  
They all have ip address in the 192.168.18.0 network, and all have the 
default netmask (255.255.255.0).  No problems with the regular pcs here, they 
can ping each other fine.  However, the alpha refuses to work.  It can ping 
itself fine (192.168.18.48; which i suppose means the ethernet works 
somewhat), but cannot ping the gateway (192.168.18.135) or another 
workstation (18.45).

   In addition to this, the ethernet device continually sends out packets, 
even when no net traffic is (or at least shouldn't be) used.  I tried 
unplugging all other cables except the server and the alpha, but the traffic 
did not stop (I thought perhaps there might be some kind of interference).  
Also, when the cable is removed from the alpha when the ethernet has not been 
shut down, it continually spits out errors on STDOUT, which is pretty 
annoying, espessially when your trying to install debian, and the ethernet 
hasn't been configured yet :)

   I've read throught the documentation for the network source in the linux 
kernel souce documentation (only for the kernel that potato shipped with 
though, i havent had a chance to look through the documentation for the 2.4 
kernel series... yet).  I couldn't find much info helpfull, only for boot 
options if you want to use the coax connection.

  Are there known problems with the ethernet cards on pws500a (driver is 
de4x5), or can i just chalk this one up to being jumbled around in shipping 
too much?

  Now for the second part, going by the compaq page:
http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/workstations/retired/aseries/techspecs.html
i see that the workstation uses ecc memory.  I've done a quick search on the 
net for prices (i would like to upgrade by about 256M) and the prices seem to 
be equal to regular SDRAM.  My question is:  Will the alpha support 'generic' 
ecc ram, and if so, at what speeds (100, 133...).  If not, does anyone know 
of a nice (fairly cheap) online shop to purchase some ram at.

  I understand most people wont just have this info sitting in their head, so 
if you dont know, but have some links to some info that might just be 
helpfull, I sure would appreciate it.

Thanks in advance,
-- 
You will be awarded some great honor.

Jonathan Nelson [icq=56665957] [aim=ciasaboark]