[PLUG] Son of Newbie Elem networking Net, RH9 no see ISA ethernet card

[Douglas Lentz <dlentz@dca.net>]

Leroy, Paul & Stephen, thanks for responding to my earlier Plea for Help 
(Newbie Elementary Networking Questions) about networking two boxes via 
crossover cable. Red Hat 9 on both boxes. Last week was a busy time with 
xmas things so only now can I give you an Update:

Box1, the bare-bones Celeron system, appears to be fine. Turned off 
DHCP, assigned an IP address, made an entry in /etc/hosts, restarted 
network, eth0 activated and I can ping Box1 from itself by name. Thanks!

BoxA, the six-year-old Pentium 200 that formerly ran Win95, has 
obsolescence issues. The box has both ISA and PCI slots. It has an ISA 
ethernet card (a 3COM 509b), but does not detect the card. ifconfig -a 
reveals only the loopback interface.  The box has only 64MB of RAM 
(filling all the slots). The memory it uses is apparently obsolete and 
very expensive - if I wanted to give it an additional 64MB I could 
acquire another bare bones system for about the same price. So, I am not 
running X on the box, just VTs (digression: but I suppose I could if I 
wanted to, but running that Gnome desktop is slow torture on this 
system. Any ideas for just getting rid of the desktop?).

Souce code for a driver appears to be there: 
/usr/src/linux-2.4-20-8/drivers/net/3c509.c. I have attempted to compile 
a custom kernel that will support this card, but without success.  I 
choose to install the 3C509 in "make config", but then "make bzImage " 
dies with "no rule to make target 
'/usr/src/linux-2.4.20-8/drivers/pci/devlist.h', needed by 'names.o'. 
Stop". And, as you can imagine, make config confronts me with numerous 
choices re things I have never heard about (like IDE-ATA level 2 and so 
forth)

So...first, am I going about this the smart way? Do I need to create a 
kernel? Suppose I pull out the ISA card and install a PCI ethernet card. 
If I reinstall Red Hat, will it detect the card and install networking 
by default? It's still a fresh install and there's no data on the box 
worth saving. OR...is there a precompiled module for this card that I 
just don't know about? Where would it be, and how would I tell the 
kernel to load it?

Thanks again - any advice is much appreciated.





___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug