How to configure SMC Ultra network card?

[nicom]

I have just inherited another computer (PII, 266Mhz,256M - greased lightning compared to my other Puppy machine) and have loaded Puppy 2.01 onto it. I installed a SMC Ultra network card onto the machine. When I go thorough the ethernet/network setup I load the appropriate driver and am told that is was correctly loaded. At the next step when Puppy checks to see what is loaded it gives a blank list, see attached screenshot.

The Driver modules box says nothing is loaded, the interfaces box says 1 interface is active. When I go to the next step and test eth0 it fails saying 'unable to connect to network'.

I have a box of these cards so I tried about 4 different cards with the same result. I also tried a different slot on the MB. I successfully had one of these cards running on another older machine running Puppy 1.04, 1.06, 2.00 and 2.01. The cable I swap from the other working computer so the connection is OK.

Am I doing something stupid? Any ideas?

[rarsa]

I'd appreciate if you can do a few tests.

After loading the drivers but before saving the module or trying to configure anythingplease run the following commands in the order indicated and tell me what you get:

Code: Select all

cat /etc/networkmodules | cut -f 1 -d " " | grep smc-ultra

lsmod | cut -f 1 -d " " | grep ultra

cat /tmp/ethmoduleyesload.txt

modprobe smc-ultra

[nicom]

Rarsa,

Thanks for that. Unfortunately I am away from my Puppy machine and will not get back to it for a couple of days. I will let you know what happens when I do.

[nicom]

I have done what you suggest although I can't say I understand it. Results as per attached screenshot.

Obviously there is no file called ethmoduleyesload.txt. I include a ROX view of the temp directory.

[nicom]

Rarsa,

I had another attempt at your suggestion and got a different result. I suspect I hadn't loaded the driver on my first attempt. Anyway here is a screenshot of the result.
After executing the modprobe command I tried continuing with the configuration but it failed to detect the network.

I will be interested in your response.

[nicom]

After much investigation I have discovered that my problem is hardware based not software. The computer in question has an Abit BX6 motherboard which I understand has some compatability issues with ethernet cards. The problem is common to both Puppy and Win98. My current investigations revolve around changes to the bios to eliminate any irq and io conflicts. So far no success.

Looking at the jumpers on the ethernet card I believe the cards preferred irq is 10 or 3 as an alternative. These irq's are taken by the USB and COM2. My first attempt involved disabling COM2 (cause I don't need it) and assigning irq available for ISA allocation. I then loaded the ethernet card driver as custom with

smc-ultra io=0x280 irq=3

I had checked that the 0x280 memory was available with Win98.

Same result as above. My next approach would be to try to move the USB irq from 10 and use that for my ethernet card.

If anyone has any ideas our other approaches I would be very grateful.

[nicom]

I managed to get the USB off irq 10 and now it will allocate irq to the network card. I cannot however get it to allocate the io ports from 0300 onward. Again I tried a custom install as per my previous post but using 0x300 but each time when I check /proc/ioports the network card has been allocated 0220-023f.

Shouldn't the custom load force the allocation?
Does anyone know of another way to force the io port allocation?