I've setup a Smoothwall machine for my wife's office, setup is pretty much identical to my setup at home in that I've taken old machines, put 270M or so HDDs in with a PCI dual port USB card and a Realtek based 10/100 ethernet card.

I've previously set up a machine with a friend and that was easy, as was my home setup. However, with this new setup I can't get the Alcatel modem to spring to life at all.

I have swapped the USB cards, so it's not that.

One thing I *have* noticed on boot up is a slight difference in messages after it says it's found the USB card. The one that works gives an error message of sorts, then talks about loading a module. The one that doesn't work does neither.

Working machine:

------------------------------------------------------------------

usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
23:51:25 kernel usb.c: registered new driver hub
23:51:25 kernel usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xc3818000, IRQ 10
23:51:25 kernel usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
23:51:25 kernel usb.c: USB new device connect, assigned device number 1
23:51:25 kernel hub.c: USB hub found
23:51:25 kernel hub.c: 2 ports detected
23:51:25 kernel Cronyx Ltd, Synchronous PPP and CISCO HDLC (c) 1994
23:51:25 kernel Linux port (c) 1998 Building Number Three Ltd & Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak.
23:51:25 kernel HDLC support routines revision: 1.0
23:51:25 kernel usb.c: USB new device connect, assigned device number 2
USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x6b9/0x4061) is not claimed by any active driver.
23:51:31 kernel usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
23:51:31 kernel usbdevfs: USBDEVFS_BULK failed dev 2 ep 0x85 len 512 ret -110
23:51:34 kernel usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
23:51:57 kernel CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
23:51:57 kernel PPP: version 2.3.7 (demand dialling)
23:51:57 kernel PPP line discipline registered.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Annoyingly non functional machine!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
23:48:23 kernel usb.c: registered new driver hub
23:48:23 kernel usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.237 $ time 10:23:42 Jul 10 2001
23:48:23 kernel usb-uhci.c: High bandwidth mode enabled
23:48:23 kernel usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0x6400, IRQ 11
23:48:23 kernel usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports
23:48:23 kernel usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
23:48:23 kernel usb.c: USB new device connect, assigned device number 1
23:48:23 kernel hub.c: USB hub found
23:48:23 kernel hub.c: 2 ports detected
23:48:23 kernel Cronyx Ltd, Synchronous PPP and CISCO HDLC (c) 1994
23:48:23 kernel Linux port (c) 1998 Building Number Three Ltd & Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak.
23:48:23 kernel HDLC support routines revision: 1.0
23:48:25 kernel CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
23:48:25 kernel PPP: version 2.3.7 (demand dialling)
23:48:25 kernel PPP line discipline registered.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm guessing, and it really *is* a guess that this line:

USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x6b9/0x4061) is not claimed by any active driver.

is the line where the working machine grabs the Alcatel device...


If I go to shell and do an

lsmod

The working machine reveals that ppp has two dependencies, but on the new machine ppp has no dependencies. (That *is* what the number in the RH column means when you do an lsmod isn't it?!)

Phew, sorry for War and Peace!

Cheers,

Rob

I think I am getting identical errors on the smoothwall boot up, and once installed and running the it says the usb controller is unset (inside the adsl section of the setup login). If I try to set the controller with the alcatel plugged in it crashes. If I try to set it with the alcatel not plugged in it says ok but returns me to the setup screen where it still says the usb controller is unset.

This is all on an older p60 machine, for which I have no motherboard manual etc. I've tried shifting irq and busmaster settings for the pci slots without any change.

Any pointers welcome. All I see are smoothwall Alcatel success stories.

I think the problem was the CMOS battery was flat.

I know, it seems bizarre, but that seemed to be what it was...