On some NICs the cycled blinking indicate 'unconfigured' in ISAPNP mode.

Once the card has been through the isapnp allocations process the LEDs
revert to their 'normal' function indicating link status and traffic.

I've seen some wierd behaviour with isapnp and some IBM 300GL desktops -
when the kernel boots the NIC gets detected, then isapnp kicks in and
reconfigures the NIC again, invariably moving it to a new I/O Address and
IRQ...

Building a kernel without isapnp solved the problem in these boxen.

YMMV...

--et

>
> Speaking of Etherlink III's... I've got one in an i386 configured thusly:
> ep0             at isa0 port 0x300 irq 10
>
> It works just fine, but one curious bit of behavior it exhibits is that
> when
> it has a carrier (it's running at 10baseT half-duplex, according to
> ifconfig
> and the lights on my switch) the LED on the card itself doesn't stay on,
> as
> some nics do, or blink for traffic, as some nics do - it blinks on and off
> roughly once a second, never changing its blink speed. Yet sometimes when
> the machine is booted, it stays solid and blinks for activity - only until
> ifconfig (called from dhclient) sets it up, however. Is this something
> anyone
> else has seen with 3com el-3's?
>
> -Sean