Morning Everyone:
I just recently did a reinstall of Red Hat 6.1. Before doing the install,
I put two new Ethernet cards in the machine, a 3Com Etherlink 10/100 Mbps
PCI (Model # 3c905C-TX-M) and a 3Com Fast Etherlink XL PCI (3C90x family).
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but my assumption was that these cards
should use the 3c90x module. After the install finished, I looked in
conf.modules and saw the following:
alias eth0 3c59x
Oddly enough, my connection for eth0 seemed to come up fine. I still
didn't have anything for eth1, so I went into X and started up the
control-panel and started up networking. It showed the second
interface on my machine, but that it was disabled. I configured it
with a static IP address of 192.168.1.1, and selected to have it come
up at boot. I then enabled it, and sure enough, the interface showed in
ifconfig.
After rebooting, I watched the start-up process, and noticed that eth0 was
initialized with no problem. However, with eth1, I got the error message
about delaying initialization. Hmmm.
I thought back to what others had said on this list, and remembered
something about conf.modules and specifying which module to use for a
particular card. Well, I changed the line in /etc/conf.modules to this:
alias eth0 3c90x
alias eth1 3c90x
I rebooted the machine, and still got the same problem. I then further
remembered about adding a line to lilo.conf for a machine that has two
Ethernet cards. So, I added this line to lilo.conf:
append="ether=10,0xec00,eth0 ether=15,0xdc00,eth1"
This time when I rebooted, both cards initialized. Ok, I was getting
closer. I ran an ifconfig when the machine first booted up, and say both
Ethernet cards listed. I went off to check the configuration of some
other stuff, and came back a few minutes later. When I ran ifconfig
again, eth1 was no longer listed, and I seemed to have problems getting
the interface to come back up again.
Well, stumped at this point, I read the Ethernet-HOWTO. It mentioned
about compiling the driver as part of the kernel, so I recompiled the
kernel, and specified that the 3c90x driver be compiled with the kernel,
and not be a module. I also made sure to remove the alias eth? entries
from conf.modules.
A subsequent boot revealed that both cards came up just fine. I ran an
ifconfig, and both were listed there with no problems. I worked on my
machine this morning for about 30 minutes before going to work, and when I
checked, both interfaces still showed in ifconfig. I thought I had this
problem solved.
When I got to work, I did another ifconfig. In the listing, eth1 is not
listed as active. I'm stumped at this point. Can anyone tell me what
might be going on here? I originally had two DaynaPORT PCI cards in the
machine with the DEC Tulip chipset, and they just worked after the
install. Maybe I got lucky, as I never had to do any of this before. I
would really appreciate any help or ideas people have on this.
Thanks.
- Mike
P.S.
Did I do something incorrect here by changing what the installer detected
my card as? Can both my Ethernet cards use the 3c59x setting without any
performance loss on the cards?
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