Balky Netgear FA311 ethernet card
I have a very small home network consisting of two computers connected
by ethernet via a hub. One computer is currently Windows only, and the
other is a Debian/Windows dual boot. The dual boot machine is an
elderly Pentium Pro system with the Netgear FA311 card. This goes on a
PCI bus. I regularly use the network with Windows on both sides, so I
know that the hardware is functional. The Debian system is woody with
the 2.4.18-bf2.4 kernel.
I am a Linux ethernet newbie, so bear with me. I have spent a good
chunk of the last week trying to get this network up in Linux, including
reading the ethernet and networking how-tos, as well as "Running Linux"
and a book called the "Suse Linux Network" (which is still somewhat
relevant to Debian). Although the driver (natsemi from scyld.com) seems
to find the card, I have come to suspect that the card is deactivated
somehow in the early boot process and remains deactivated.
To explain further, my hub has an indicator light for each input. As
soon as my dual boot machine gets power, the indicator light on the hub
comes on. For a windows boot, the light stays on. For a Debian boot,
the light comes on when the machine powers up, but then turns off early
in the kernel boot sequence. No matter what I do with the software, the
light never comes back on, and this is consistent with the card showing
that it has not transmitted or received any packets.
During the Debian boot, the light turns off by the time the boot
sequence is doing some timeouts on my SCSI interface. There is no
mention of the card during this early part of the boot sequence, but it
does come up in the kernel messages (with no obvious problems) when the
natsemi ethernet driver runs as a module. The scyld site mentions
loading a pci-scan module before the natsemi module. I am not sure what
the pci-scan module does (it is not in the debian woody distribution,
although natsemi is), but I have tried it and it does not cause the
ethernet hub light for the ethernet card to turn on.
I theorize that the kernel is probing the PCI bus and doing something to
the card right at the start of the boot. I can provide much more detail
on what I have done if it would help. Are there any kernel
configuration settings that could be causing this problem (and how do I
check them?). Would greatly appreciate any assistance.
Rick
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