The story has a happy ending. I went back to the computer store to
return the Netgear card and pick up a more expensive 3Com card that I
knew would work, and lo and behold, there on the shelf, along with
about 50 other netgear cards with the clone chip, was a single card
that looked just slightly different-- with a different chipset. I
looked at it a bit closer, and it was indeed a DEC chip. So I traded
the cards, went home, installed the new one, did a small bit of
configurating, and now IPNAT is working quite well as my housemates on
my intranet can attest.

Well, it wasn't that simple a process. After I got both ethernet cards
working and checked that my computer could ping computers on the
intranet as well as internet, I went over to my housemate's win98 box
and tried pinging my machine, which worked, but he couldn't access the
internet. Everything appeared to be set OK, I checked and rechecked
all of my settings. Finally I did a 'sysctl -a', and noticed that the
suspiciously named option, net.inet.ip.forwarding, was set to 0, so I
set it to 1. Suddenly everything began to work.

I'm curious why none of the Networking FAQs mention this sysctl
setting. Were /usr/sbin/ipnat or /usr/sbin/ipf supposed to toggle this
one on their own? Have I done something wrong by manually toggling
this option? Is there some way to have this configuration set
automatically at boot without adding a line to set it in
/etc/netstart.local?

Thanks for any help or information. 

-Zach Fine
czyz@u.washington.edu


>>>>> "Rafal" == Rafal Boni <rafal@raptor.com> writes:

    Rafal> Manuel Bouyer wrote:
    >>  On Mar 3, Zach Fine wrote > > varieties available at the local
    >> computer store, I bought the rather > inexpensive Bay Networks
    >> NetGear 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI Adapter FA > 310TX, which
    >> according to http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/pci.html > should
    >> use the "de" driver (unless of course that page's inclusion >
    >> of 'Bay Networks NetGear cards' is meant to exclude the
    >> particular > card I bought).  > > [...]  > > Lite-On
    >> Communications product 0x0002 (ethernet network, revision >
    >> 0x21) at pci0 dev 9 function 0 not configured >
    >> 
    >> I guess this card doesn't use the Dec chip. Maybe it's a clone,
    >> but I fear they just changed their board design and use another
    >> chip.

    Rafal> New revs of the NetGear FA310-TX's use the Lite-On PNIC
    Rafal> chip, which is a Tulip clone, but not good enough of a
    Rafal> clone to work without mods to the DE driver.  Jason Thorpe
    Rafal> had, at some point, mentioned he was working on a driver
    Rafal> for the PNIC/MXIC/... (not-100% tulip-clone) chips, but
    Rafal> there's nothing available yet, AFAICT.

    Rafal> --rafal

    Rafal> -- Rafal Boni rafal@raptor.com Raptor Systems, Waltham, MA
    Rafal> http://www.raptor.com/ 781.530.2200