Re: 3Com Etherlink 3c509b PnP

["Joseph C.Bender" <jcbender@telocity.com>]

On Tue, 02 January 2001, "Brian chance" wrote:

> 
> Concerning hardware support for the 3c509b PnP etherlink card,
> 
> I have recently read in a past FAQ that the 3Com Etherlink III 3c509 / 509b
> should to be set out of Plug 'n Play mode for more efficiency in OpenBSD.
> The problem arised that i am unable to set my card out of PnP mode (my
> computer seems to crash when running the program for this task) . 
>
The only times that I've ever run into this is when there was an address conflict of some kind with the non-pnp settings of the board.  Try configuring it in a different machine and see if that makes a difference.


According
> to the list of supported hardware, the 3c509b PnP is actually supported, but
> i'm still having problems using it. Formerly, this card *did* infact work in
> FreeBSD while in PnP mode... Will it at all work in OpenBSD while in PnP
> mode or will i still have to switch it out of PnP mode somehow? 

Yes.  Even if the PNP works, OpenBSD seems to have some sort of bug between the ISAPNP module and the normal 3c509 driver.  On my first install of OBSD, I had a 486 that the install disk detected the thing not once but twice!  The 3com driver picked it up with the "set" values, and then ISAPNP configured it as something else, but as ep0 had been reserved it assigned the card to ep1.  Which ended up being the card assignment that worked.  Obviously this is *not* an optimal solution, even though the card worked in that situation.  The 509b seems to be a solid card (with what I've seen so far).

Considering
> i know my default gateway, DNS server, IP , Netmask , Domain and host name
> is there any *easy* way of setting up the network configuration again (the
> ifconfig program looked pretty scary at first sight - all those ARP switches
> and stuff) =\
>
As a matter of fact there is, go read section six of the FAQ (which covers networking). It's very concise, nd you don't really have to mess with ifconfig all that much, or at all, really.

<http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq6.html>




Signing off,

Joseph C. Bender
<jcbender@telocity.com>

""Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell on top of a 16-bit 
extension of an 8-bit OS written for a 4-bit CPU by a 
2-bit company that doesn't like 1 bit of competition." 
 ---???