On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, fission wrote:

> Well, I don't know whether this is the answer you're looking for, but
> this happened to me once (during an install actually).  The IRQ
> settings for my ethernet card were wrong (or at least not what NetBSD
> expected them to be).  I would check this out (make sure your ethernet
> card is set for the right IRQ...)

As it turned out, the card was (presumably) locked to BNC (I don't know
if this is possible but that is what it seemed like). The greatest source
of confusion was that the first (working) NIC made appear two interfaces,
ne1 and ne2 (where ne1 was the BNC port of the same card) and ne2 worked
fine. When I later plugged another NIC into the bus, I first failed to
notice that the TP part of the first card "moved". Thus, after the
new NIC was inserted the devices changed from:

ne1 (Card #1 BNC interface)
ne2 (Card #1 TP interface)

To:

ne1 (Card #1 BNC interface)
ne2 (Card #2 TP interface)
ne3 (Card #1 TP interface)

i.e. the working card had been renamed to ne3 and the new card
(which only appeared as one device with "Ethernet Manual" as
unchangeable media-type) "inserted" between the two logical
parts of the first card.

A friend gave me an other NIC to try out, but now I drop into
kernel debugger on boot because of IRQ-conflicts. (My GOD
this whole ISA stuff is *cwap* -- makes it seem laughably
optimistic that they've put four ISA slots in the machine. ;-P ).

I don't even have any other cards in it apart from the VLB
Gfx/IO/floppy/IDE-all-in-one card -- this was prolly one of
those pre-fab package deal PCs once.. it doesn't even come
with manufacturer name on it; it belonged to one of the 
uni labs before.

I'm borrowing a *fourth* NIC in a few days hoping that *some*
combination of the three working cards will actually co-exist.
Is there any other way to resolve IRQ-conflicts like these?
I don't know jack about PC hardware and certainly not stuff
like this. I'm starting to run out of friends with leftover NICs
and this whole trying-combinations-of-different-cards-until-
it-works procedure is getting annyoing. :-)

Somehow eventually getting the soundcard in there too would be
nice, but I think that is being too optimistic.

Any help from IRQ-experienced people appreciated.

-- 
/ali: Computer Science Major and aspiring cartoonist. :-) 
(dept) dat94ali@ludat.lth.se - http://www.ludat.lth.se/~dat94ali
(home) ali@h543.sparta.lu.se - http://h543.sparta.lu.se/
* a4000/040/18M/AmigaOS3.0 - NetBSD-1.4.1 - cogito, amiga sum *