stupid NIC tricks

[David Dahl]

your mother board is half-dead.  I have seen this with every 7200 I have ever owned (4 or 5 of them), remember, that was apple's first ever PCI machine!


On Fri, 16 Aug 2002 14:42:39 +0000
"Frank Smith" <wai1234@hotmail.com> wrote:

> OK braniacs.  Here's today's challenge:
> 
> PM7200 running up-to-date full install YDL (2.3 + latest patches)
> 
> Cheap Linksys NIC installed (model LNE100TX, common as dirt, uses DEC Tulip 
> chip) to get 100BT since builtin is only 10BT.
> 
> Latest pci-scan and tulip modules built and installed as per instructions to 
> drive this board.
> 
> Boot probes board and insists Linksys is eth0 (builtin becomes eth1).
> 
> eth1 set to be OFF on boot (I'm not using it).
> 
> Here's where it gets interesting...
> 
> Cold boot brings up eth0 (Linksys) fine, ifconfig shows eth0 is handling 
> packets, but NO IP-based traffic gets through (telnet, atalk, etc).
> 
> Warm boot (shutdown -r) brings up eth0 and EVERYTHING WORKS!
> 
> Another warm boot...same story.
> 
> Try cold boot (shutdown -h)...broken again (although ifconfig says 
> otherwise)
> 
> Warm boot...WORKS AGAIN!
> 
> Any suggestions?  This seems like some sort of order dependency bug (i.e., 
> something is done to the board registers or something else that survives a 
> warm boot but isn't set at the right time on cold boot so the board never 
> really makes it all the way up).  Note the driver for this board loads as a 
> module if that matters. I think there may be some sort of generic driver in 
> the mix too that's built into the kernel by default?
> 
> Sidenote: I also tried an SMC card based on the RealTek chip and the board 
> wouldn't probe at all on boot.  Installing the driver (rtl8139) module 
> finally got it to work as eth1 (builtin was eth0 in this case) but it kept 
> crashing the machine on large ftp transfers with an "oversize frame" error 
> or some such left in the log.
> 
> Odd sidenote: when the board is working, netatalk works great except the 
> machine doesn't show up in the Chooser on other Macs.  They can enter the IP 
> address directly and mount netatalk volumes but can't select it from the 
> list.  When I turn off eth1 and use eth0 (builtin NIC), the machine DOES 
> show up on the list as expected. Yes, I modify atalkd.conf to specify eth0 
> or eth1 as appropriate so that's not it. Note: the SMC board did not have 
> this problem.
> 
> Last straw: As an alternative, can anyone reccomend a cheap 100BT NIC that 
> will be rock solid and stress free?  This is the final bit of functionality 
> I really must have on this box.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Frank
> 
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