NIC + settings for RH 6.0

OK, I followed the instructions, and what I found was that the listing in the PCI listed a network card, but had it with a different name.  Then when I did all the changes and rebooted, card failed to initialize (eth0).  Here are the contents of the PCI dealing with the adapter

Bus  0, device  15, function  0:
    Ethernet controller: LiteOn LNE100TX (rev 33).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  IRQ 10.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.  
      I/O at 0xe400 [0xe401].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xeb000000 [0xeb000000].


Kejtar

BTW I am using Red Hat 6.0
Kejtar

Okay, that looks suspiciously like the tulip driver mis-identifying the card. I'd reccomend opening the case and finding out exactly what you've got, per Netgear's notice. If it looks like one of the late cards (most likely scenario), then you could try either the latest tulip driver, or the Netgear variant. I think I'd try the Netgear driver first, since you are running 6.0 and that OS release matches pretty well with the date in the Netgear FAQ.

I tried both the tulip from the nasa website, and the Netgear one.  Still the same entry in the PCI, (I would like to point out that it is grabbing the right IRQ for it).  

Anyways, I am really stuck now.
Kejtar

Have you checked to see which version of the card it is? It's possible that the one you have should be ID'ing that way, but I would have expected to see something else. Where is it failing, at boot with a "Failed" notice? What do you see if you do a "ifconfig -a"?

I have been running low on time recently, and I did not open my case till now: my card is revision D1...
I will answer the rest of questions by later tomorrow.
Kejtar

I was out of town for over a week, so I had no way to work on my problem till now, anyways............

On bootup it says:
initializing lo [SUCESS]
initializaing eth0 [FAILED]
delaying the initialization of eth0
............

Also tulip still sees my networking card as a Ethernet controller: LiteOn LNE100TX (rev 33).
     
Kejtar
P.S.  Like I said, my card revision is D1.

Adjusted points to 200

What does ifconfig say? And is PnP mode enabled in your bios, if so turn it off.

Here is what ifconfig says:
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:3924  Metric:1
          RX packets:50 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:50 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

and PNP change made no difference either.  Same fail notice
Kejtar

Okay, the kernel is definitely not recognizing the card, as I've suspected. Let me go find the reference that I had before about that card.

Adjusted points to 300

I'd appreciate it..............  I looked all over the web myself, and some books, and all they describe is the general steps....
Kejtar

(Not being sarcastic)
Have you read the linux.txt file that comes on your driver disk?

1.  During installation of Linux, make sure that the "C Development"
        selection is choosen under "Component to Install" window.  This will
        copy the C compiler into the system for compiling the driver.

    2.  Also the Network Configuration window during installation, you will
        be asked if you want to configure LAN (not dailup) networking for
        your installed system.  Answer YES.

    3.  Insert the floppy disk with the FA310 driver, and mount the disk into
        the system with the following command:

          mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt

    4.  Copy the Linux-related files from the disk into the system hard disk
        with the following command.  Four files will be copies: "cctulip",
        "tulip.c", "Copying", and "linux.txt".

          cp /mnt/linux/*.* .

    5.  Compile tulip.c by executing the "cctulip" command at the prompt.
        The following command will be executed.

          gcc -DMODULE -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/linux/net/inet -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O6 -c tulip.c

    6.  Find the names of the files in the /lib/modules directory.  You
        might see the following directories.

          eg. "2.0.36-0.7" and "preferred".

    7.  Copy the newly compiled tulip.o into the latest kernel's modules.

          cp tulip.o /lib/modules/2.0.36-0.7/net/tulip.o

    8.  Reboot the system.

    9.  You can check if the driver is properly activating the card using
        the "dmesg" command right after system bootup.

Step by step, there is everything you have to do to make sure that you're using the latest driver.  If this doesn't work, I would recommend getting a new network card.

Hope this helps.

Son of a gun, this is the fifth time in the last two weeks that I've found one of my comments that I know I posted missing from a question...

What was supposed to be right after your last comment on the 9th was...

The Netgear card is supported by the the tulip driver. The config options for the card are on http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/tulip.html as is the latest (0.91G) version of the driver. The command to compile the driver is the "compile-command" in the comments at the very end of the driver source.

After the driver has been installed in your /lib/modules area, you can try to load it with "insmod tulip.o debug=1 options=0" which would load it in "Auto-select" mode. It may not work all that well (or possibly at all) in auto-select mode. You can force 10Mbps 10baseT with "options=12", and so forth per the table. If you can't use the default option of 0 in your set up, you'll need to add a line to /etc/conf.modules like:

options tulip 12

ok, I have downloaded the driver from the website, but for some reason all of the compile commands come up with whole bunch of warnings leading me to believe that the .o file will not be properly setup for my machine.   So what would you all think about me trying to run an installation of redhat as an upgrade, and provide it with the path to the network card tulip driver during install?

Kejtar

I think 6.1 has a late enough tulip driver to work as is, although you might have to specify a media option in /etc/conf.modules.

What warnings did you get. Most of the time warnings are just that and don't affect the compiled .o file.

Is there any way to dump the warning messages into a temp file while compiling?
Kejtar

Yep, there is. If I want the results to be placed in the file /tmp/gcc-results, I'd do:

gcc -o gork gork.c >/tmp/gcc-results 2>&1

The bit with 2>&1 causes both stdout and stderr to become the same stream, so everything goes into the results file.

A for persistence and helpfullness.... and of course for correctness.

As a side note, I took a little bit different approach to it to solve it though.  What I ended up doing is downloading RH 6.2 and installing it.  Then during install I have chose one of the DEC network cards and it work ( dec card has the same parameters and tulip drivers as mine.)
Thanks for all your help
Kejtar

I believe that worked because 6.2 has the latest tulip driver. We probably could have sorted out the difficulty with 6.1, but 6.2 is a bit nicer in several other respects (and it does have a later kernel...) so it's a good solution also.