Re: network woes with laptop and pc card ethernet

Jeff Vian wrote:

I am having problems with networking on my laptop.

FC2 on a Dell Inspiron 5000 with PC card ethernet.
I have 2 different ethernet cards and the symptoms are the same with
both.
3C562B/3C563B dual network/modem card
3C589D 10base2/10baseT card.

On both the choice of network media depends on the dongle attached
(10baseT or 10base2)

I had no problems with the network interface when running redhat 9.

With FC2 it sees the device and loads the 3c589_cs module (I do not
remember which module was used with RH9) and properly configures it.  I
am able to start the network.  It links to my switch as 10Mbit full
duplex as indicated on the switch leds.

Here is the weird part.
Sometimes (intermittently) I am able to get out to other machines and
other times I cannot.  When I do successfully connect it usually after
some period just stops communicating.

I thought possibly it was an issue with speed/duplexing so I tried
mii-tool to see what the parameters of the adapter were, but it tells me
there are no mii interfaces available. In fact the error message with
mii-tool is "SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth0' failed: Operation not supported
no MII interfaces found"

"route -n" properly shows me the routing, both network and default.

From the laptop, ping to the adapter address works, ping to the default

gateway does not.

From the other devices on my network everything works except pings to

the laptop address.

I am certain it is a "failure to communicate" between the pc card and
the switch, but I am at a loss on how to proceed.

My options seem to be: 1. get this (these) adapter(s) to work reliably (preferred) or 2. get a new adapter.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to identify/fix the problem since
mii-tool will not work for me?

TIA
Jeff

The first thing I would try (because it is known to work for certain 3com cards using the 3c5x9 module and might be the same issue) is to turn off kudzu running at boot, then reboot the system.

chkconfig kudzu off
reboot

It seems that FC's version of kudzu hoses certain 3com cards with the probing it does.

Chris

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  "Spend less!  Do more!  Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
  Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021