SOT: Networking problem with SMC Combo(AUI)
This is almost surely not Debian specific, but there is
not USENET feed here in Ireland that I'd have access to,
so please bear with me.
I am trying to Ethernet-connect two i386, a P133+AsusPT4XE
and a K6-2/300+AsusP5A. The former has been tried with
Debian 2.0r1,r3 and some slink snapshots, various
kernels 2.0.33/34/36 and 2.1.129, the latter 2.0r1
and 2.0.34.
The boards in question are 16bit ISA SMC Ultra,
Combo featuring BNC, RJ, and 15pin AUI. No ROM
on board, jumper setting 3 to set I/O 0x300, IRQ10,
RAM 0xCC00, ROM none. The chipset is SMC UltraChip
83C790QF, the board has a (C) 1993 label, a Rev A
imprint, and numerous other numbers and labels.
This will get lengthy, so if you do not know this
particular combination, maybe you want to bail out
now.
--------------------------------------------------------
I got
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resource temporarily unavailable
SIOCADDRT: Network is unreacheable
until I did the RTFM with the Ethernet HOWTO. I got
into the PCI/PNP BIOS on both machines and enabled ISA
Shared Memory, with a CC00 base and a 16K size, and
that problem was fixed.
I checked /proc/interupts and /proc/ioports for
collisions, flagged IRQ10 as "Used by ISA" in the BIOS,
and put the following in /etc/conf.modules:
alias eth0 smc-ultra
options eth0 irq=10 io=0x300
dmesg gives:
eth0: SMC Ultra at 0x300, 00 00 C0 AF 88 C3, IRQ 10 memory 0xcc000-0xcffff
lsmod gives:
Module Pages Used by
smc-ultra 1 1
8390 2 [smc-ultra] 0
Now, ifconfig -i gives me (after some ping etc.)
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:C0:AF:88:C3
inet addr:192.168.1.1 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:203 errors:121 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:242
Collisions:1936
Interrupt:10 Base address:0x310 Memory:cc000-d0000
Note the different base address: that again is allegedly
okay for SMC cards with 8390, which have an offset. In
/proc/ioport I find:
0300-031f : SMC Ultra
and in /proc/interrupt I see:
10: 375 SMC Ultra
The assigned IRQ is indeed used, I guess.
My routing table looks like this:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
localnet * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 2 eth0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 2 lo
default * 0.0.0.0 U 1 0 13 eth0
I tried both a twisted pair board-to-board and a BNC.
The cat5 and the terminators, T's and cable have been
tested and checked in another LAN. Module or builtin,
changed routing tables, no matter what I tried, I just
keep piling up TX errors, and don't even get a Network
unreacheable or other response. WinNT gives me a ping
timeout when trying to reach the Linux box.
I had networking set up a couple of times earlier, I
think I even used one of the boards before, maybe
even with Debian 1.3.1. If anybody has an idea of what
I am doing wrong, please drop me a line. I have been
told that SMC Combo cards might cause trouble, does
anybody know this particular variety?
b.
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