I'm trying to set up a really small home network using my Slackware 9.1 box as a gateway (router) for another one with Slackware 10.2 installed, so I can access the internet through both and share files between them. I can imagine getting all that working by connecting 9.1 and 10.2 with a crossover cable, having found a lot of identical threads about it.

What has been giving me a serious headache is some revived demon of ye olde hardware worlde, that is causing an IRQ conflict between my snd-ens1371-based sound card and my second ne2k-pci-based network card (eth1). I'm currently on broadband via an 8039too-based network card (eth0) through PPP. This is all happening on an AMD-751-based motherboard, with two CD/DVD drives, two IDE hard and one floppy disk drive connected.

I've already tried to disconnect the floppy (and remove it from /etc/fstab) so IRQ6 would be available, but that doesn't seem to work. So I suppose IRQ3 and IRQ4 will remain with COM2 and COM1, respectively, even if I would try to manually assign them to either the sound or network card in the BIOS ... ?

Now of course many of you will say 'Go buy a router and shuddup already' and you're probably right, but with two of five PCI slots still free (and right now only being able to use two properly) I feel kind of betrayed

Is it really necessary to flash on a new BIOS? Before doing that (and having to bury the motherboard) or having to find, decide on and buy a router, I'd really like to know what I'm missing here. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Here is, of course, the output of lsmod, lspci -vb and dmesg on pastehere.com

Have you tried the cards in different pci slots?
Good luck.

Yes, I've tried swapping them around (must be something like 18 different possible positions) ... to no avail.

Is the sound card ISA? I don't see it listed in your output or the snd-ens1371 module.
Good luck.

It's (fortunately?) PCI ... heard all sorts of nightmares about ISA devices, though. The card is actually inside between both NICs and when I boot insmod fails, the same way insmod failed loading the ne2k-pci driver, when I built it in after the sound card. I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since the BIOS nor Linux should know 'who comes first', right?

Here's a part of the error log I get when booting (pasted from /var/log/syslog):

Jun 23 21:32:56 darkstar insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.o.gz: insmod sound-slot-0 failed
Jun 23 21:32:56 darkstar insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.o.gz: init_module: No such device
Jun 23 21:32:56 darkstar insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.o.gz: Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters. You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg

Not much news from dmesg, except:
Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard not found or device busy

Edit: I'm going to try another old ALS4000-based soundcard from Avance Logic,Inc. to see if I can narrow this down a bit.

Are you certain the card is not damaged or bad in any way? You could try passing the noapic and/or the nolapic options at boot.
Good luck.

Just tested the snd-ens137-based card in Windows, it's working alright. Let's forget the ALS4000-based card, that just opens another can of worms

Looks like you're spot on again, Peacedog I've found this Wikipedia article about the Intel APIC Architecture. Under 'Considerations', it states the following:
The bold part is the last line of my dmesg output.

So, all I need to do is insert the line append="noapic nolapic" in my /etc/lilo.conf, right?

Yes, I'm not going to guarantee that it'll resolve the problem, but it's worth a try. Don't forget to run lilo after you've made the changes.
Good luck.

Adding noapic and nolapic didn't help much. I've replaced the ne2k-pci with another 8139too card, but still get the same 'failed insmod' error, which probably means that the snd-1371 card simply won't* live next to two network cards or it's an inherent problem of the AMD-751 mainboard. Am I being that exotic by having this kind of setup? I would've thought my hardware is mainstream enough to use it this way ...

* Maybe this is something worth mentioning in its HCL section?

Edit: I've learned that only IRQ 5, 10 and 11 are actually entirely free to use. In my case 5 is occupied by the nvidia card, 10 and 11 by the NICs.

And here's a post by jailbait from a different thread:
Bah, that just sucks. Why don't they sell mainboards with a warning on them: Dear customer, because of defective design, you may only use two of five PCI slots. Sorry for giving you any hopes on actually using our hardware. So long and thanks for all the cash! ... :angry:

Did you remeber to run lilo after you made the configuration changes? Does the sound card or nic work at all? Have you tried configuring the sound card or manually loading the module? Just throwing out some ideas. What does your lilo.conf look like now?
Good luck.

I admire your patience and persistence with this problem, Peacedog

I ran /sbin/lilo and here's my /etc/lilo.conf just do double-check:
boot="/dev/hda"
lba32
prompt
timeout="100"
root=/dev/hdb1
vga="791"
image="/boot/vmlinuz"
label="Linux"
root="/dev/hdb1"
read-only
append="noapic nolapic"
other=/dev/hda1
label="Windows98"
image="/dev/hda1"
root="/dev/hdb1"

Yes, I'm sure all of the NICs work perfectly, as does the sound card. They (network and sound) just don't like to be combined with each other. I hope this is something that was corrected on newer mainboards. alsaconf fails just like modprobe snd-ens1371. Let's see if Shuttle (the mainboard manufacturer) responds to this.

Do you have a bios pnp os option? If so you could try turning it off, although that may wreak havoc on your windows install. I'm still reading a few things on this. We may find a fix yet.