On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 07:58:38AM -0700, Eric Richardson wrote:
| dman wrote:
|
| <clip>
| >
| > Since the cards are PnP, you'll probably need to use a DOS utility to
| change the card's settings. Perhaps you can get isapnp or some linux
| > tool to do it, but I haven't tried.
| >
| > You could stick the card in a DOS box, or make a boot floppy to run
| > DOS from. Boot DOS from the floppy, then put the floppy with the util
| > on it in and run it, then reboot back to debian.
|
| This sounds pretty simple. I knew this had to be a pretty simple
| solution but couldn't really think it through. Thanks for telling me
| what should have been obvious.
You're welcome. Here's a few more notes -- last night I moved that
EA-201 into my soon-to-be-router box. To make the DOS system, fire up
windows or dos and
format /s a:
now reboot with the floppy in the drive and you'll have DOS. Not
much, but enough to put the setup floppy in and modify the EEPROM.
Most of my difficulty came from software that is "too smart" -- it
wouldn't let me set the IO and IRQ I wanted on one of the NICs because
"it conflicts". Never mind that the only reason the NIC was in that
box was because my router box has no floppy drive! I also found that
the NICs had half-duplex set by default. (why it doesn't
auto-configure, I don't know) I changed that to full-duplex but my
switch still shows it as half-duplex. Oh well. (oh, yeah, and I ran
the util on each card separately, I'd kinda like to see what it would
do if both NICs were in the box at the same time, then send a rant to
Netgear)
After sticking the two NICs back into the router box, the kernel would
only find one of them. I have the 'ne' driver built in to the kernel,
so mucking with modules.conf leads nowhere. The trick, as google
showed in the Linux-Ethernet HOWTO, is to have 2 ether= arguments in
the command line. For the config I gave the NICs, it looks like :
ether=11,0x300,eth0 ether=15,0x320,eth1
Curiously enough, if I left the IRQ off of the second card, it came up
with 32 (not possible, I don't think) and would get watchdog timeouts
when trying to bring up the interface. Now both cards are working
beautifully.
To summarize :
1) make a DOS system ("format /s a:")
2) boot it and run the DOS util to configure the NICs, be sure
and use different IO for each and spare IRQs
3) put the proper 'ether=' args in your bootloader or specify the
IO (and IRQ) parameters in modules.conf[1]
HTH,
-D
[1] the Right Way is to make a file in /etc/modutils/ to store the
config and run 'update-modules'