On Sat, 5 Jul 1997, Christopher R. Bowman wrote:
> In the newer macbugs that I got off the CodeWarriorCD you can type
> help (or somethig similar) to get a list of commands and some
> explanation of what they do, using the log command you can export this
> to macos and print it.

Yeah, but you need something to log.

> I am actually very interested in this problem and since I have been
> poking around the relevant sources maybe we could give it a try.

> The very first thing we all really need to know is what kind of 
> chip is running this card. [snip] We are looking for a manufacturers
> symbol and a number that looks like 8390 or 83932 or 83???

Nothing resembling that.  It's a custom chip made by Sonic Systems, Inc.

> The problem is that NetBSD isn't reading your MAC address correctly
> (the 00:00:00:00:00:00 number from your message)  If you have a NIC
> (8390 variant) card this might not be a problem.

Yeah, I'm running it fine at that address right now.  I also saw
00:80:00:80:00:80 once, but most of the time, it appears to find its MAC
address correctly if MacOS initializes it first.  (Right now I'm booting
off of a disk and don't have enough space for the drivers, though...)

I initially thought that there were more problems than just finding the
MAC address, because I hardly got any activity on the hub when I
pingflooded a nonexistant host on the network.  Then I learned what ARP
requests were for.

> you could try to hardcode the driver to not try and read the MAC address
> from the card but instead fill the registers with the correct value
> that NetBSD's driver isn't reading off the PROM correctly.

That's an icky solution - I'll either keep running it off of 00:00.. or
tweak the kernel so it can actually detect the card and read its MAC
address correctly.  My network consists of 4 machines, so I'm not worried
about another card coming onto the network with a broken address.

If I can find a clean solution, I'll post a patch to the list or
something.  (Shouldn't be too hard to find... the ROM is only 256 bytes.)

> Yes the Asante MacCon-i nubus card I have in my IIci works very well
> and as I recall it ran me about $100

Thanks.

Tris