Re: 8003EP nic installation woes...
Greetings;
I have successfully installed the 8003ep nic.
Many thanks to Michael Heldebrant for his moral support, the sharing of
which files I may want to look at to determine conflicts, and for his suggestion
that sacrificing a brown rooster (rather than the white one I was tying
to the alter with printer ribbon cable) is the proper offering to the nic-gods.
Environment; Dell 486/50P, 32meg ram, 3+ gig hdd, 3-1/2 and 5-1/4 inch
floppies. Debian 2.2r2 floppy base install with 200+ megabytes additional
debs installed from ftp.eecs.umich.edu via ppp. Obligatory recalcitrant
Western Digital 8003EP network interface card (otherwise why the posting?).
I also have access to a T1/T2 line via a dolly; I carry the setup to my
girlfriend's office and find a spare ip number by brute force pinging. ;-)
Unfortunately the first time I attempted to connect to the internet by this
method I spent the weekend attempting to talk to my nic.
The short story is I set the W1 jumper to software enabling, I left the
W2 jumper at no ROM, and I changed the W3 jumper from bnc to aui, and via
EZStart I changed the settings to io=0x380 irq=5 mem=0xC8000. Then via
modconf I installed the wd.o driver with the parameter io=0x380. The module
autoprobed for the other settings and I had successful interfacing to the
nic via several retarts.
Now for the longer version of the story.
I picked up EZStart and Diagnose from SMC's website. Select 'Drivers and
Manuals,' under Quicklinks select 'Current Drivers,' and near the top of
that page select 'Utilities.' I chose to get 'ISA DOS Diagnostic' and 'EZ
Start for Ethernet.'
On the 8003EP the two hard-jumpered settings didn't work for me. Those
were io=0x280 irq=3 ram=0xD000 and io=0x300 irq=5 ram=0xCA000. Any irq
settings where the io was 0x280 or 0x300 didn't work.
Michael pointed me in the direction of /proc/interrupts and /proc/ioports
to check for conflicts. And he told me that "things should be working but
sometimes it's a black art."
The boot-to-dos change-the-config boot-to-linux test-the-driver shutdown-linux-try-again
got really old. So I found out where wd.o was located; /lib/modules/2.2.18pre21/net.
And I created a temp directory and copied all the files except for wd.o
there. And with another quick look at the man pages I decided to change
the configuration command from 'modconf' to 'modconf --restart-section net.'
On a 486/50 that really sped up the process. ;-)
I did all the changes from home. So this weekend I'll attempt to 'dolly-net'
again to install some more packages via the network connection.
I hope that this information is clear. I'm sometimes a stream-of-consciousness
writer. So topic-jumping is a definite possibility.
And in the interests of allowing someone else to search the archives for
this information based on the card that they have let me also state the
other designations for this card; SMC 8003EP Ethernet Plus Elite. When
I was searching Altavista I only got three hits for the specific card.
And one of the sites was down.
I hope this information may be of use to someone else.
Tony -
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