[Gllug] Dazed and confused

[William Palfreman]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, George wrote:

> Matt, the driver for Xircom is xirc2cs_ps or something, and there's another
> tulip driver, configure your kernel with both and see muck around till you
> figure out which one you need. It's good practice to scrounge around the
> kernel for the option you're looking for
> 
> Hope that helped
> 
> Bye for now
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matthew Bunter" <matthew at marbit.freeserve.co.uk>
> > All,
> >
> > Two computers :
> > One running Windows connected to Internet with modem. Have NIC in Windows
> box, IP = 192.168.10.100
> >
> > Laptop (IBM Thinkpad 570E) with RH 7.1, Kernel 2.4.2
> > NIC is Xircom RealPort2 - I haven't been able to find this on any hardware
> comp list.
> >
> > When booting I get an error message that something failed. If this is the
> same as the message obtained by dmesg then it is : autonegotiation failed;
> using 10mbs.
> >
> > Done my ifconfig stuff, added the default gateway and a route but when
> pinging I get destination host unreachable.
> >
> > Reading Network HOWTO and old notes from the last time someone had these
> troubles but still no luck - help a newbie please.
> >
> > Matt (Sorry it's Red Hat waiting for Debian to be delivered) Bunter

Personally, Debian pisses me off.  All that "Software in the public
interest" stuff is just so cloying and icky.  Also, the stable version is
incredibly out of date.  Its all very well when you on some kind of
broadband, but on a modem downloading all those updates is mental.  I
don't want something to be so out of date I can't use any of the supplied
packages for fear of security holes, and I don't want to be bleeding edge
either as that brings its own problems.  I mean, what's with all those
debian patches anyway?  Having run RH at work on piles and piles of
machines, I find it much easier to use and secure what I know rather than
learn all that apt-get malarkey.   

Anyway, you may be using Rh7.1, but on RH6.2 I found the Tulip drivers
worked much better from the 2.2.19 kernel than earlier ones. 2.2.19 is
roughly ~ 2.4.3 in 2.4 terms - i.e. some drivers made it into both for the
first time then.  2.2.14 it pretty poor with those Xircom cards - 500Kb is
all I could get with RH6.2 before upping the kernel.  Running 2.2.19 I got
30Mb instead - not bad.  As someone else has said, Redhat have broken SysV
init for PCMCIA networking, as the card services is set to start after
networking.  Change the sequence number in /etc/rc.d/rc3 and 5.d/ to fix
that.  Also, I found that Xircom tulip-based Ethernet cards can take up to
40 seconds to come up after they are started.  Don't know why.  For rh7.1
you should probably upgrade to a newer 2.4 kernel on  - something
between 2.4.6 and 2.4.9  Personally I am a bit sceptical of a kernel
release( 2.4.9) that had a full week of development since the release of 
its predecessor (2.4.8).  That being said, I am probably going to give
2.4.10-pre8 a try later today, now its been a few weeks and my new
kernel-withdrawal symptoms are coming back.  (grrr)

Regards,
Bill.


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