A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hi.  What I've done and it's been the easiest is to get two pci identical
nics.  Make sure they are exactly the same.  I use two of those realtechs
that you mention but any identical pci pnp nics will work.  Then you
compile pci support into your kernel as well as the realtech or the
ne2k-pci driver.  They will both be detected and each assigned their own
irq.  After that it's just a matter of assigning eth1 to the internal lan
side and eth0 to the external.  I've done this  many times so feel free to
write if you have more problems.

PS.  You can easilyy get two cheap nics for around 9 or 10 dollars each.x

--- Raul A. Gallegos mailto:raul at asmodean.net http://www.asmodean.net
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals..  Then
something happened, which unleashed the power of our imagination...
We learned to talk...

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Geoff Shang 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.
>
> 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.
>
> I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
> in the
> ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
> the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
> "ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
> meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
> still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
> in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
> eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
> tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:
>
> 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.
>
> Geoff.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>