frustrating problem with networking encountered while installing "Woody"
I'm trying to dual boot an old Pentium box with Debian
"Woody" and win98. The few bugs I've encountered are
falling one by one as I work on the new installation.
However, one persistant mystery has remained stuborn.
Here is the problem: booting from Windows, I can get
onto my home LAN and reach the internet just fine with
a dial-up gateway (the Actiontec dual pc modem) as the
DHCP server. But if the Linux partition boots, the
network vanishes. It pauses for an unusually long
time at "configuring network interfaces......" By all
indications, networking on the box is functional:
there are no hardware related error messages during
boot or in the kernel logs. loop-back is fine when I
ping 127.0.0.1, but no other IPs are reachable.
conversely, the box can't be pinged by any other
machines on the network either. Flashing LEDs on my 8
port switch seems to indicate there is a signal
present, but nothing is getting through in either
direction when Woody is running. The NIC is a netgear
FA 310TX for which I'm using the tulip driver.
In addition to Windows, KNOPPIX networks just fine
with no problems.
An experienced collegue suggested that there might be
a IRQ conflict with another device. Debian boot lists
the NIC as using IRQ 12. In windows, the diagnostic
tool AIDA32 returned the following:
IRQ 0C shared NETGEAR FA310TX fast
ethernet PCI adapter
IRQ 0C shared IRQ Holder for PCI
Steering
First of all, what is PCI steering? Is there a way to
uncouple the two so they use different IRQs?
My own suspicion is that an old USR Sportster ISA
winmodem might have something to do with it. The
thing is useless with Linux but I don't want to trash
it because it still works well under Win98. I think
it is worth keeping for those rare emergencies. does
anyone know if an IRQ would be assigned by Linux to
hardware it doesn't recognize?
The last time I handled Linux was when Redhat 5.2 was
new. Back then I don't remember having much hardware
headaches. At the end of my ropes, I even tried a few
days ago to explicitly declare an IP, hoping the DHCP
server might back down and just let the damn NIC talk
to somebody-anybody.
After some googling, I found one other account of
almost the same problem:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=110910
the only difference is the router being used.
The guy who started the thread never said if his
problem was solved. I've tried everything suggested
to him to no avail. Everthing that is, except the
last one, which I didn't quite understand. I quote
the following:
"I have the exact same network card that you do, and
have had the same problem. I have never been able to
do a net install with dhcp using the bf2.4 kernel. So
what I do is just install the base system with the
vanilla kernel. Then just apt-get the 2.4.18 kernel
source and compile it with the tulip driver and MAKE
SURE you also have packet filtering and socket
filtering enabled as well. They are under the network
options. You must have those two options enabled for
dhcp to work with that card. So the bf2.4 kernel
probably doesn't have them enabled."
I'm not sure I understand what is being said. Are you
supposed to apt-get the 2.4.18 kernel with the 'Woody'
iso disc set as the source? I'll try to learn how to
recompile the kernel to see if that solves the
problem, but I wanted to see if anyone else has
encountered similar problems and suceeded in solving
it.
Thanks in advance for any new insight.
-Ren
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