A tail of two NICs - help needed

A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Geoff Shang]

Hi all:

I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
all that.

My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
and the old one was nowhere to be seen.

I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
in the
ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
"ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:

eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.

Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
thought that PCI was fairly flexible.

Geoff.

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Brad Thomson]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 16:04, Geoff Shang <gshang@uq.net.au> wrote:

> Hi all:
> 
> I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
> linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
> unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
> PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
> all that.

Sometimes ISA and PCI cards just won't live in harmony, as the PCI card
simply doesn't see the resources that the ISA card wants.

> My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
> card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
> 0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
> Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
> SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
> and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
> and the old one was nowhere to be seen.

Yeah, I have one of these SMC cards in my machine, and remember trying to
configure it with a ISA PNP Soundblaster... fun fun fun.

> eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.
> 
> Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
> without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
> thought that PCI was fairly flexible.

If you don't want to fiddling with jumpers or isapnp, your best bet is to
tell the system that an ISA device wants IRQ10 by changing the setting in
BIOS. It's usually under something like PNP Configuration, and you need to
change the setting from PCI to Legacy/ISA.... if you can work, or have
someone handy who can do it for you.

Hope that helps,

Brad.

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Kirk Wood]

Geoff,

If you have the (financial) resources I would recomend you look into
getting a couple low cost pci nics. I have seen these as low as $15 a
piece and they often even come with linux drivers (or use the ones already
there). It is then as simple as putting the first one in and getting it to
work, then adding an alias to have the second ome up. The only caveate is
that the order may not be as orginially thought. (The first one you place
in may be the second one enumerated and thus eth1 instead of eth0.) This
is a minor detail easily corrected with the cables though.

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net

The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[jwantz]

Hi Geof,
I have two SMC1211tx cards in my Linux machine at home.  They coexist
perfectly happily, one on irq 9 and the other on 12.  If you can't solve
your problem soon I'd pull that other card and put in another 1211.

Good luck!

      Jim Wantz WB0TFK
On Wed,
1 Aug 2001, Geoff Shang wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
> linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
> unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
> PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
> all that.
>
> My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
> card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
> 0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
> Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
> SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
> and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
> and the old one was nowhere to be seen.
>
> I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
> in the
> ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
> the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
> "ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
> meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
> still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
> in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
> eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
> tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:
>
> eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.
>
> Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
> without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
> thought that PCI was fairly flexible.
>
> Geoff.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi Geoff,

I've got a couple of suggestions.
First, if the isa card is  not a pnp card, I'd recommend 
changing its jumpers to use a different irq that's free in your system.
Second, you could get in to your bios,
and manually alocate an irq to your pci card (over-ride automatic irq
alocation by the bios).
Hope this might help in some way.
Greg


On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 04:04:17PM +1000, Geoff Shang wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
> I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
> linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
> unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
> PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
> all that.
> 
> My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
> card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
> 0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
> Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
> SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
> and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
> and the old one was nowhere to be seen.
> 
> I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
> in the
> ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
> the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
> "ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
> meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
> still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
> in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
> eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
> tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:
> 
> eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.
> 
> Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
> without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
> thought that PCI was fairly flexible.
> 
> Geoff.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Gregory Nowak]

How well and for how long do theese
$15 cards work after they're installed in the machine?
Greg


On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 08:50:01AM -0500, Kirk Wood wrote:
> Geoff,
> 
> If you have the (financial) resources I would recomend you look into
> getting a couple low cost pci nics. I have seen these as low as $15 a
> piece and they often even come with linux drivers (or use the ones already
> there). It is then as simple as putting the first one in and getting it to
> work, then adding an alias to have the second ome up. The only caveate is
> that the order may not be as orginially thought. (The first one you place
> in may be the second one enumerated and thus eth1 instead of eth0.) This
> is a minor detail easily corrected with the cables though.
> 
> =======
> Kirk Wood
> Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net
> 
> The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
> If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hi.  What I've done and it's been the easiest is to get two pci identical
nics.  Make sure they are exactly the same.  I use two of those realtechs
that you mention but any identical pci pnp nics will work.  Then you
compile pci support into your kernel as well as the realtech or the
ne2k-pci driver.  They will both be detected and each assigned their own
irq.  After that it's just a matter of assigning eth1 to the internal lan
side and eth0 to the external.  I've done this  many times so feel free to
write if you have more problems.

PS.  You can easilyy get two cheap nics for around 9 or 10 dollars each.x

--- Raul A. Gallegos mailto:raul@asmodean.net http://www.asmodean.net
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals..  Then
something happened, which unleashed the power of our imagination...
We learned to talk...

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Geoff Shang wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
> linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
> unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
> PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
> all that.
>
> My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
> card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
> 0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
> Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
> SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
> and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
> and the old one was nowhere to be seen.
>
> I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
> in the
> ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
> the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
> "ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
> meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
> still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
> in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
> eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
> tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:
>
> eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.
>
> Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
> without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
> thought that PCI was fairly flexible.
>
> Geoff.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Kirk Wood]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> How well and for how long do theese
> $15 cards work after they're installed in the machine?
> Greg

Hmmm, since they are still working two years after installation I don't
know. But they seem to work great for me. In my case I have two Linksys
cards using the tulip drivers. I ahve two other cards using a modified
driver that the manufacturer supplied. I have another Linksys card in my
windows machine that has been working for about a year now. It also came
with a driver for Linux. In fact, it happened to have a CD with Linux in
the package.

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net

The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Gregory Nowak]

Kirk,

Are theese 100 mbps capible cards?
Greg


On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Kirk Wood wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> > How well and for how long do theese
> > $15 cards work after they're installed in the machine?
> > Greg
> 
> Hmmm, since they are still working two years after installation I don't
> know. But they seem to work great for me. In my case I have two Linksys
> cards using the tulip drivers. I ahve two other cards using a modified
> driver that the manufacturer supplied. I have another Linksys card in my
> windows machine that has been working for about a year now. It also came
> with a driver for Linux. In fact, it happened to have a CD with Linux in
> the package.
> 
> =======
> Kirk Wood
> Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net
> 
> The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
> If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Kirk Wood]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Are theese 100 mbps capible cards?

Yes. But I will do one better. CDW has D-link DFE-530tx cards for sale for
$12.35 plus shipping and handling. When I saw it, I can say that this
represents two of the cards I have. They were the ones that came with a
modified driver. They have been working fine for over two years now.

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net

The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Raul A. Gallegos]

ummmmm, well with nics in my experiences they have been like memory.  If
it works from the beginning it will pretty much work for a very long time.
If you have troubles from the get go then you will have problems.  The few
pairs I've used have never given me trouble.

--- Raul A. Gallegos mailto:raul@asmodean.net http://www.asmodean.net
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals..  Then
something happened, which unleashed the power of our imagination...
We learned to talk...

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> How well and for how long do theese
> $15 cards work after they're installed in the machine?
> Greg
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 08:50:01AM -0500, Kirk Wood wrote:
> > Geoff,
> >
> > If you have the (financial) resources I would recomend you look into
> > getting a couple low cost pci nics. I have seen these as low as $15 a
> > piece and they often even come with linux drivers (or use the ones already
> > there). It is then as simple as putting the first one in and getting it to
> > work, then adding an alias to have the second ome up. The only caveate is
> > that the order may not be as orginially thought. (The first one you place
> > in may be the second one enumerated and thus eth1 instead of eth0.) This
> > is a minor detail easily corrected with the cables though.
> >
> > =======
> > Kirk Wood
> > Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net
> >
> > The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
> > If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

Re: A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Terry D. Cudney]

Hi all,

	My experience has been very positive with two NIC's. I've always used two identical ones, as others have suggested.

	The one thing that I have found easier than compiling the driver into the kernel, has been to compile the drivers as modules and pass the necessary parameters in the alias lines of the modules.conf file. I've never used "compiiled-in" drivers, so I really can't compare, but modules have worked very well for me.

	HTH,

		--terry

Name:	Terry D. Cudney
Phone:	(905)735-6127
E-mail:	terry@wasagacottage.com
Web:	www.wasagacottage.com