[Wylug-help] Thanks a lot ISA NIC WORKING FINALLY

[Bentony@leedsnet.com]

>I use a (non-PnP) ISA NE2000 clone that I purchased from Software
>Warehouse a few years ago and it installed with no problems at all.
>It has a wide range of base addresses and IRQs that it can be
>configured to use (via a DOS utility that writes to the EEPROM),
>which makes it particularly flexible in a system that is desperately
>short of IRQs.

Aren't all systems short of IRQs? Certainly I have had inconvenience
trying to setup a system with more than two serial ports; and found
that it was not possible to run a modem and an IR port simultaneously
on another.

>Personally, I have had more trouble with PCI 10/100 cards that argue
>constantly with the network switch about how to negotiate a 100Mb
>line speed, and also cards that refuse to work in a bus-master slot
>other than the first PCI slot (on a MB with four bus-master
>slots ...).

Yes. I spent the whole of Easter Sunday afternoon installing a
PCI network card. It is labelled 'RTPI PCI Ethernet Adapter',
but may actually be something else (or vice versa), and is quite
a common card of this type. (Details are in the PCI sources).
I was contemplating giving this up as bad job, when by chance I
tried the card in the top slot. (Hitherto I had been using the
lowest slot, where it seemed to leave more room for access to
the MB; thinking that all slots were equal). It worked straight away.

The lesson is that some cards have not so much a fear of heights
but a requirement for it.

I spent a lot of time with Tom's Root and Boot disk and various
PCI utilities, and became quite familiar with the error codes
and similar matters from studying the linux sources. Serious
information about PCI was quite hard to come by, though there
was some useful stuff on the Intel site. I believe that there is
a (pay and fairly expensive) PCI consortium, so that accurate
and full information is confined to Intel and its friends.

Networking can be a black art. With linux there can be a trade
off between buying expensive kit which should work and give
high speed performance, and pressing into service cheaper stuff
which may or may not work well, or may (as I constantly find)
need some hand-holding. Unless one is very unlucky, once
the card is set up, and the configuration files edited, it will
work indefinitely, which is not always the case with a well
known Alternative Operating system.

Ben.


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