DHCP fails, IP fails, packet framing errors?
I recently installed Fedora Core v1 on a Dell Latitude laptop. All went perfectly fine except for one important thing - the network is useless. I've read through several threads in here and elsewhere on similar troubles with receiving DHCP addresses, but so far, nothing has helped me. I thought I would put out my situation and observations here to see if anyone had ideas.
The card I am attempting to use is a PCMCIA 572/574 series 3Com Etherlink III card. Fedora didn't seem to have a hard time recognizing it, and I know the card is at least functioning in some form because:
1. I can use Ethereal and TCPDump to watch packets on the wire.
2. I can see packets generated by the card from another computer (using a sniffer).
3. The card's MAC address shows up on the network switch MAC tables.
I can even watch the card make DHCP requests, but it never gets a response. My WinXP,2000 and OSX boxes all have no trouble getting responses, and their packets appear to be identical (except for HW addresses of course).
I have checked and re-checked my hosts and resolv.conf files, they match, and are set up correctly. The firewall is completely turned off, and verified by running an "iptables --list" command.
Now, moving on. I assigned the machine a static IP, a completely routable IP, non-conflicting. Similar to the DHCP problem, nothing seems to answer any of my requests, whether it be ARP, or DNS, broadcast or addressed. 1% of the time, however, I will occasionally get a response, however. This is the weirdest part, to me. If I ping a machine that is on the same switch, I might get 2% success (if looking at the packets, I will only get 1 or 2 replies to an ARP).
Last observation - an 'ifconfig' looks completely normal except for one glaring problem - my RX packets are getting dropped, apparently because of frame errors:
RX packets: 37 errors:31 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:31
All else (including transmits) look fine. Seems to me this could be the root of the problem - it's just not receiving packets correctly. It's not the cable or the networking equipment or the card itself - all tested good. So I am left thinking that I have a driver problem - but as to how to fix it, I do not know.
Thanks for any advice, I appreciate it.
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