Re: Gateway with one NIC / dhcp problems

[Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net>]

Follow up on my own posting...

Nick Holland wrote:
<snip>
> If I'm understanding part of your problem, you are seeing your ONE
> physical NIC show up twice -- ep0 and ep1.  Shut off the PNP "feature"
> of the NIC, this should go away and solve your problem.
<snip>

It is REALLY spooky when I post something then come across the same
situation minutes later.  That's at least the second time that has
happened to me.

Just did an install on one of my systems and got the exact same
response the original poster did -- "two" NICs even though only one
was installed (event the same pair of "settings").

On this particular machine, the 3C5X9CFG.EXE program normally used to
reconfigure the card to non-PNP mode refused to see the card!  Being I
haven't seen either of these symptoms myself before myself (and I use
a LOT of 3c509Bs, though I usually turn off PNP mode before I get
around to installing an OS), I'm suspicious the problems may go
together, apparently some kind of PNP problem.  

<wild speculation>
I'm guessing that when placed in a machine without a PNP BIOS (like
this one of mine) to configure the card, the NIC "defaults" to the
300/10 setting (3C5X9CFG.EXE kinda confirms this), but moves when the
ISAPNP software initializes it.  I'm thinking that OpenBSD sees the
3c509 at its "default" location, does the ISAPNP stuff, and looks to
see if anything new has come on-line, and as the 3c509 has "moved", it
sees it again.
</wild speculation>

I thought I would pass on the solution in case someone else finds a
machine they can't disable PNP on a 3c509B in:

On the 3c509B support disk is a batch file which will turn off the PNP
mode even when 3C5X9CFG.EXE doesn't recognize the card (really non-PNP
machine), called PNPDSABL.BAT, run it, power cycle the machine,
problem solved, you can now properly configure the card.  (BTW, this
is all done from an <expletive deleted>-DOS prompt).

Contents of PNPDSABLE.BAT:
  M:\NETCARD\3COM\3C5X9X>type pnpdsabl.bat
  3C5X9CFG /PNPRST
  3C5X9CFG CONFIGURE /PNP:DISABLED

Nick.
-- 
http://www.holland-consulting.net/