Hi, folks!


I'm a network administrator typing from Brazil and I'm facing a crazy problem with Red Hat 6.2.
I installed two ethernet cards (already tried a lot of models of 3Com (905b, 905c, 980) and also Realtek (8129, 8139)) on a PIII-1.13GHz, and the situation is the following:

- The cards doesn't work if both are enable, but if I disabled (ifdown) one, the other begins to respond to ping;
- Ifconfig detects both (eth0 and eth1) at irq10 and irq11, respectively;
- I tried to swap the cards to different slot positions to avoid conflicts, but fails;
- There's no conflict between the cards, cause I tried to install other versions of Red Hat (7.2, 7.3) and the machine works well;
- I tried to compile the driver sources into the kernel instead of modules, but anyway without success;
- I also tried to upgrade the original kernel (2.2.14-5.0) to the newer version (2.4.20). Guess what? Same problem;
- At last, I tried to do all these things in a complete differente machine expecting hardware incompatibilities... Same situation;

Has anybody experienced similar problems using two ethernet cards with Red Hat 6.2? Am I doing something stupid? Is there some secret in this version that I don't know?
I would like to justify that I need too much that this thing works because I have an outdated commercial software that runs well just on Red Hat 6.2.

Please, somebody help me! I would be greatly thankful.
Happy new year!

PS: Sorry about my poor english :-)


Reginaldo O. Andrade
reginaldo@totalalimentos.com.br

where are the 2 card's cables plugged into? is it on different parts of the network?

it sounds like your cards are ok but something maybe wrong with the routing, are you using manual ip or dhcp?

Um.. Yes

I had a similar problem using 2 3com 3c509's way way back (when 6.2 came out), in the same machine.

1 worked.. 2 didn't.

One 3com card, and one (other) card worked fine.

I left it at that.

Slick.

Hello,

I run a 6.2 box for a firewall, and had the same problem at one time or another.

Here is what you should check.....

First, you need to make sure that the network cards are running on different I/O addresses. If they are the same (like 0x310h), your computer can't use them both. I use a 3com configurator to manually configure the cards to different I/O addresses. This can be downloaded at www.3com.com (I think). Also, I use older 3c905 cards, this might not be applicable to newer cards.

Second, you might have to add a line like this:

append="ether=11,0x210,eth0 ether=10,0x310,eth1"

...to your /etc/lilo.conf file (changing the information to match yours of course). This allows the computer on boot to recognize both of the cards.

That should do it. Just make sure the cards are running different I/O addresses and your append statement correctly identifies the cards (eth0 vs eth1), and you should be good to go....

Good Luck,

Jim

Hi, folks!

I finally discovered the cause of my problem (after a few days trying), and I would like to say that it has nothing to do with I could imagine to be:
I just disabled the option "Plug And Play OS Aware" at BIOS setup and everything works fine!
Many thanks to all the people who tried to help me, you're pretty cool.

Reginaldo O. Andrade
reginaldo@totalalimentos.com.br