"Zdenek Salvet" <salvet@ics.muni.cz> was kindly helping me out last
night, but we ultimately got bogged down and I hope to avoid standing
still until our time zones allow for communication again.

A summary of the problem thus far.  (Please note that the ethernet
card seems to have been at least partly functional due to my gateway
host seeing ARP packets, a point that I'm not sure was noted in
previous responses.):

My original problem:

Using the 15 March (ides of March!) snapshot to install ...
I seem to have the documented PCMCIA problem in the new setup.  I used
floppies to get a working kernel on my machine.  At this point, after
booting succesfully and reentering sysinst, I can't seem to do an ftp
installation due to the following problem.  I describe my desired
network configuration machine to sysinst as:

interface: ep1
domain:
host name: <empty, also tried assigning one>
ip number: 10.0.0.4  <this is an address not managed by dhcp on my home net>
netmask: 0xffffff00
ip of your gateway: 10.0.0.1
ip of your name server:  <Also tried giving it ISP's external name server>
Network media type: 10baseT

It then fails to ping the gateway.

Exiting to /bin/sh, I can see that it has a routing table looking like
this:

Routing tables

Internet:
Destination	Gateway		Flags
default		10.0.0.1	UG
10.0.0.0	link#1		U
10.0.0.1	link#1		UH
10.0.0.4	0:0:86:1b:96:81	UH
127.0.0.1	127.0.0.1	UH

Things it can ping: 

127.0.0.1
10.0.0.4

Things it can't ping:

anything else, it seems.  Ip addresses on 10/24 get "ping: sendto:
Host is down"

What does tcpdump on the gateway [10.0.0.1] show?

jwjr# tcpdump 
tcpdump: listening on ne0
00:01:36.983616 arp who-has 10.0.0.1 tell 10.0.0.4
00:01:36.983656 arp reply 10.0.0.1 is-at 0:40:33:a0:b5:1e
00:01:37.989197 arp who-has 10.0.0.1 tell 10.0.0.4
00:01:37.989240 arp reply 10.0.0.1 is-at 0:40:33:a0:b5:1e
00:01:38.989095 arp who-has 10.0.0.1 tell 10.0.0.4
00:01:38.989132 arp reply 10.0.0.1 is-at 0:40:33:a0:b5:1e
^C
6 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel

*Please note* that the gateway machine starts receiving these packets
only after I initiate the ping, and I can see the relevant lights on
my hub blink from the traffic.

What is the network configuration of the gateway like?

jwjr# arp -a
? (10.0.0.1) at 00:40:33:a0:b5:1e permanent
? (10.0.0.4) at 00:00:86:1b:96:81
? (10.0.0.6) at 00:60:97:ee:7c:01
^C
jwjr# ifconfig -a
ne0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        address: 00:40:33:a0:b5:1e
        media: manual
        inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255

The first reply was that I probably had an interrupt problem.

Analysis under Windows 98 seemed to show this set up as:

3Com EtherLink III PCMCIA (3C589D)


X Use automatic settings

Resource Type		Setting
-------------		-------
Input/Output Range	1020-102F
Interrupt Request	11

Conflicting Device List:

No conflicts

After that the next reply indicated I should check /kern/msgbuf.

/kern is an empty directory on my half-installed machine.  Also, after
using fdisk to mark the Windows98 partition active, shutting down and
booting  Windows to analyze the card settings, and then booting netbsd
again, my machine now no longer finds the card at all.  

Can anyone help me out?

I've tried dropping into the kernel debugger and setting some
interrupt mask, per the current snapshot install document, but the
kernel complained that that was an unknown symbol.  I've also received
advice to rebuild the kernel with this mask set like so:

# Avoid irq 5 and 7, the most likely cause of problems on modern laptops.
options         PCIC_ISA_INTR_ALLOC_MASK=0xff5f

I don't know how to rebuild the kernel used during the installation.
For example, where do I get the sources and compilation environment I
need to do so?  Should I cross-compile from another machine and if so,
what's involved in getting my 1.3.3. machine ready to compile this
-current snapshot kernel?  Alternatively, can I copy over the relevant
stuff to the target install laptop on floppies, and if so, what's the
relevant stuff?

Thanks in advance for any help!
James Wetterau