Greetings, all.

I'm trying to set up ipcop on a "legacy" machine which is a P166 with 3 PCI slots and 4-ish ISA slots. 2 of the PCI slots are taken (video, ide), leaving 1 only for a NIC. The PCI NIC (Intel) is auto-detected and works fine, in fact I performed ipcop install over this ("green") i/f.

THE RATIONALE:

Just before I throw this box on the skip, I want to give it the chance of a few more years of use as a f/w, which is why I am persevering with 2 apparently identical 3C515-TX ISA cards. If I fail, I will get hold of something with more PCI slots and use that -- but I don't have a spare one sitting in my garage Smile

THE SAD TALE:

I can neither autodetect nor force-load any of the supplied 3COM drivers for either of these cards from the driver disk. I was wondering if anyone here had had any success with ipcop and one or more of these cards, and if so, how did you crack it?

Whilst awaiting a response to this post, I intend to try the following:
1. check BIOS & disable PnP if necessary/possible.
2. boot the machine into DOS and use 3com utilities to a. disable PnP if necessary, b. ensure 2 cards have non-conflicting interrupts & i/o address.
3. try autodetect/force-load of ipcop 3c515 driver again.
4. try getting a shell (not sure if this is possible*) to force-load separately compiled 3c515.c driver.

* I tried progressing through the install without assifning red/orange networks to NICs, but this doesn't seem to be allowed -- is there a breakout to a shell (a la Red Hat ctrl-f1)? (or is that shift-f1 or alt-f1?)

Am I at least trying the right things?

THE PLEA:

I've spent some time searching for this, but haven't turned up anything conclusive as yet, so any hints will be appreciated -- thanks!