On Sun, 2003-07-13 at 17:27, Colburn wrote:
> > (3Com nic is supported out of the box).
>
> In my notebook, loaded with RH9 yesterday, the 3Com 3c501 nic is seen
> but not recognized (hardware identified but networking refuses to use
> it).
>
> Solutions, suggestions, please?
>
Are you sure it is a 3C501? The 3C501 was the original 3COM ISA bus
ethernet card. To put it bluntly, the card is a POS. In the early
days of Linux ('94-'95) someone was offering $0.50 to anyone who would
take a 3C501 out of service, $1.00 if they sent the controller chip
(thereby signalling the demise of the card). Here is a comment
from the driver source:
This is a device driver for the 3Com Etherlink 3c501.
Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is
horrible, and it breaks in many ways.
Best advice - get a decent card. Second best advice - get a decent
card. Failover advice for someone insistent on using the card: The
card needs a dedicated IRQ and an I/O address. These are set by
jumpers on the card. First off, you need to determine what these are
and make sure that you have no conflicts with either the IRQ or the
I/O address. Do not depend on PnP, the card is just plain old.
The driver only probes two addresses as shipped: 0x280 and 0x300. Best
to use either of these (the default was 0x300); if you use any others
you will need to manually load the driver module. If you've done this
and it does not work, read my best advice again. You can peruse the
boot.log to see if it is recognized. Again, this is an old card (has
not been manufactured in over 12-13 years), it is fussy, and you will
need to do a lot of BIOS and card level configuration outside of Linux.
Once you get it working, it will drop packets rather frequently, so
performance will be dog slow. Best to spend $10 for a better card than
to deal with it, IMHO.
- rick "Who gleefully trashed 100+ of these cards in 1993" warner
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