3C509 ethernet card on Hoary Hedgehog
James Gray
james at grayonline.id.au
Mon May 2 00:07:48 UTC 2005
On Mon, 2 May 2005 06:53 am, David Wittenberg wrote:
> I just installed Hoary Hedgehog on an old system, which was working
> when I got it. The network card is the ancient and honorable 3Com
> Etherlink III 3C 509TP (note this is not a PCI card.) When I do a
> standard install, it does not recognize the card. I added the line
> 3c509
> to /etc/modules and network settings now says "The interface eth0 is
> not configured". Without that line in /etc/modules, network settings
> says nothing about an ethernet connection.
>
> How can I configure the ethernet connection? Ideally, I'd like to get
> into the friendly installer, as I plan to give this machine to a
> friend whose not terribly tech-savy, but I can work my way through
> command lines if that's what it takes.
Hi Dave,
Can't help you with the GUI-based tools. I do this stuff from the command
line. If you can drive a text editor (xemacs, nedit, pico, vi - anything)
you'll be fine. There's no fancy command line fru-fru for this :)
Being an ISA card, the kernelhas no way of probing for IRQ's and memory
address for the card. Best thing to do, if download the 3Com configuration
tool, set the card up and make a note of the base memory address and IRQ.
I found the setup utility here (google "3C509 ISA configuration ~utility"
and 2nd hit):
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/3c509/3c5096.1.htm
You need to make sure the kernel is "addressing" the card correctly. On my
firewall (Debian Woody...but same in Ubuntu AFAICT) I have the following
lines added
/etc/modules:
3c509
/etc/modules.conf:
options 3c509 irq=10 # didn't need to specify the base I/O address
You shouldn't need to reboot to activate these changes in Linux (naturally
you'll need to rebot to run the config tool etc). Simply doing a "sudo
modprobe 3c509" to load the module is all that is required. If the module
loads, but there's still no "eth0", just unload the module (sudo modprobe
-r 3c509) and edit the modules.conf again. Rinse and repeat until
"ifconfig -a" shows an "eth0".
Now that you've got the NIC setup and the kernel module configured properly,
you need to configure "eth0". "man interfaces" is your friend here. The
network config for all interfaces is done in /etc/network/interfaces (well
most interfaces - ppp etc have their own config).
For a single NIC being set up via DHCP you can get away with a very simple
addition to the /etc/network/interfaces file:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
then add "eth0" to the "auto" line:
auto lo eth0
If you need to configure a static IP the "iface eth0" stanza needs to
resemble this:
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.10
gateway 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0 # optional - see "man interfaces"
broadcast 192.168.0.255 # optional - see "man interfaces"
network 192.168.0.0 # optional - see "man interfaces"
same deal witht the "auto" line though.
Once the file has been edited, and the kernel has loaded the module for the
3Com card correctly, you should be able to simply bring the interface up:
sudo ifup eth0
...and that's it.
Other's may be able to point you to some GUI-based tools, but the command
line's you need are only (prefix each with "sudo"):
1. modprobe 3c509 (and maybe "modprobe -r 3c509)
2. ifconfig -a
3. ifup eth0
Everything else can be done with *any* standard text editor (GUI or
"text-based" - whatever you're comfy with). BTW - you'll need to be root
to edit the files too: "sudo <text-editor>" should be all that's required.
HTH - cheers,
James
--
Hanson's Treatment of Time:
There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days
before Saturday.
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