Conflicting Workstations
 

I'm hoping you can help me with a "small" problem I'm having. I've 10
workstations using the Tulip driver (10Mb/s lan card). DMESG shows the Tulip0 driver loading and then finding the card and assigning eth0 straight afterwards.

Each workstation is identical in terms of software and hardware (clones) and has Slackware 12, 2.6.24 kernel, static I.P 192.168.3.xx
in ./etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and netmask 255.255.255.0

When one workstation is powered on eth0 is setup correctly and is shown in ifconfig. It will contact the server over NIS/YP just fine.

The second workstation will hang for ages as it tries to resolve a connection. Finally NFS, YP etc will all fail and I can log in as root. ifconfig will not show eth0. lspci shows the card and lsmod shows the tulip driver loaded. Again it assigned eth0 in dmesg, but now it's not available/visible.

I'm trying to think what this could be. Each workstation was a different
hostname in /etc/HOSTNAME and the name is changed in /etc/hosts as well.

I haven't set any tulip driver options or haven't over-rided the mac address.

Any ideas? I must have something on the cloned workstations that is
conflicting. Once I shut-down the first workstation and the second booted
fine, so that the first workstation now had the problem.

Many thanks for just reading this! Even more thanks if you have any
suggestions!

Do you have a fully populated /etc/hosts file (all names and associated static xx numbers) on you NFS server? Is that file being served?

If yes to both then next step would be to turn off (chmod -x) rc.nfsd and with the first box booted and connected to NFS server will this box boot and ifconfig show proper static ip xx number?

Come back with answers and we can go from there.

ppd

I solved it yesterday evening. The card is being registered as eth0 but slackware must have a file somewhere for the network card in the original machine. When it can't find it rc.inet1 shifts the new card to eth1 and I didn't have settings for that.

So I added IFNAME[0]="eth1" to rc.inet1.conf and everything is perfect. I can't locate the file it has for the original card but at least this works. :)

Andrew