Mediaone/Multiple Machines

[jcallen at narsil.com (Jerry Callen)]

Chris DiTrani wrote:
> I will share one tip: Unless
> you have experience getting multiple NICs working under Linux, save
> yourself a lot of possible trouble and buy two identical PCI NICs. I was
> trying to use one PCI and one ISA NIC and just couldn't get it happening. I
> know in theory this should be easy, and my trouble could be related to the
> BIOS on the old machine I was using, but it wasn't easy for me.

I had a similar experience, but with an old 486, ISA-bus system. I wound up
making a list of all the devices in my system, along with how each each could
be jumpered (or, in the case of one NIC, software-configured) WRT I/O address,
BIOS address, DMA channel use and IRQ, and then figured out a compatible matrix
of addresses. Between the sound card (which was how the CD-ROM was attached),
the two NICs, the motherboard resources, etc. it was a royal pain in the neck.
But I did learn a lot about my machine in the process, and eventually got it to
work. It took several nights. I also had to figure out the module loading stuff
in Linux, but that was not as painful, since I didn't have to physically move
junk around.

One thing I did early on was to get each card working by itself; at least that
way I could be sure that the cards were actually supported and worked.

In some perverse way one could perhaps say this was fun. :-)

-- Jerry Callen                      Mobile: 617-388-3990
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