A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Brad Thomson]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 16:04, Geoff Shang <gshang at uq.net.au> wrote:

> Hi all:
> 
> I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
> linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
> unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
> PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
> all that.

Sometimes ISA and PCI cards just won't live in harmony, as the PCI card
simply doesn't see the resources that the ISA card wants.

> My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
> card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
> 0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
> Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
> SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
> and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
> and the old one was nowhere to be seen.

Yeah, I have one of these SMC cards in my machine, and remember trying to
configure it with a ISA PNP Soundblaster... fun fun fun.

> eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.
> 
> Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
> without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
> thought that PCI was fairly flexible.

If you don't want to fiddling with jumpers or isapnp, your best bet is to
tell the system that an ISA device wants IRQ10 by changing the setting in
BIOS. It's usually under something like PNP Configuration, and you need to
change the setting from PCI to Legacy/ISA.... if you can work, or have
someone handy who can do it for you.

Hope that helps,

Brad.