Weird network card behavior on OpenBSD
 

I scrounged an old HP Vectra with a 166 MHz Pentium proc and 48 MB of RAM to set up as an OpenBSD firewall. The box has two networking cards in it. I'm not sure of the makes and models of each, but one shows up as dc0 and the other as le1. The install went OK, but at the time I only configured one of the cards, dc0, so I could get the box on my network and get a feel for OpenBSD. However, when I started to configure le1 while working on the firewall (I hadn't started messing with forwarding of PF yet) did not have much luck. The system would recognize the card, and I could assign an IP, but it was as if the Ethernet cable was unplugged (it wasn't :) ). I could not ping this machine, nor could I ping other machines via this interface. Setting it up to get an IP via DHCP didn't work either; I just got timeout messages.

Anyone seen anything like this before? I'm thinking of just getting a new network card...

Thanks for any info.

Older ethernet cards often needed to be configured for the type of connection. 10Base5 vs. 10Base2 vs. 10BaseT, or even simply the speed/duplex if it's 10/100.

Scrap it, pay $10 and go on with life. I've never had much luck using the older network cards. OpenBSD supports the drivers but the low speed card is a blocking point in your network speed especially if youu are using it in your firewall. You could also set the speed selection to auto and will usually pick the right one.

On a side note, I have an OpenBSD firewall with a 200Mhz processor, no fan, 64 MB RAM and an 850MB harddrive. The longest it was up was 193 days and it only shut off because my house lost power.

D

Ok, a couple of things.

I've played with it a bit, but it gives me errors when I try to specify a media type. Here is what the hostname.le1 file looks like:

inet 192.168.1.25 255.255.255.0 NONE media 10BaseT

It says something about an improper format. (I don't have this box handy at the moment, otherwise I'd have the exact thing.)

I do indeed have an extra Ethernet card which I planned to put in, but this comp (an HP Vectra XM 5/166) uses some kind of arcane PCI slot, and has two more modern looking ones, one of which has the Ethernet card that works, the other has the vid card. The Ethernet card I'm having the problem with came with the computer and uses one of the strange PCI slots. (I'm sure there's a technical term; don't have the docs with me.) I don't know where to go about getting one of the older cards, so my only option would be to take out the vid card, which I've thought about doing as I don't really need it once I can SSH into it.

Or maybe I'll just go find another older comp looking for a home...

You'll probably want to make it:

inet 192.168.1.25 255.255.255.0 media 10BaseT

OK, I changed it to that. But now I get this message:

ifconfig: media: bad value

I also tried replacing 10BaseT with 100BaseT and 10/100, but with the same results.

BTW, what driver is le1 meant for? Any particular makes of Ethernet cards? Just wondering.

Could you paste your ifconfig output and the part of the dmesg that concerns the NIC's.


From OpenBSD.org

# AMD LANCE and PCnet-based ISA adapters (le), including: (B)

* Novell NE1500T
* Novell NE2100
* Kingston 21xx

# AMD LANCE and PCnet-based PCI adapters (le), including: (B) (C)

* BOCALANcard/PCI
* AT&T StarLAN 10, EN100, and StarLAN Fiber

NE2100 Ethernet cards (le)

Here's the output from ifconfig, minus the part about the loopback interface:

dc0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
address: 00:c0:f0:4b:f1:87
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)
status: active
inet 192.168.1.15 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
inet6 fe80::2c0:f0ff:fe4b:f187%dc0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
le1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
address: 00:60:b0:00:7d:4a
inet6 fe80::260:b0ff:fe00:7d4a%le1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
inet 192.168.1.25 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
pflog0: flags=0<> mtu 33224
pfsync0: flags=0<> mtu 2020
enc0: flags=0<> mtu 1536

Hey, sorry for the belated reply; do you think you could aslo paste the dmesg. Thanks.

OK, thanks for all of your help. For some strange reason, this box is not working, and probably down for good. It kept giving me parity errors after booting, and now it won't boot at all. I'm going to try to fix it, but I don't think there's much hope. I guess I'll just have to get another firewall box. :( Maybe I'll check the closet again.