Dell on board NIC

Hi,

I'm running Mandrake 8 on an old 486 Dell PC, it has an on board 10baseT NIC, how can I set it up to work in Linux, so I can use a cable modem?

Thanks,

- Nick

The first thing you will want to do is have a look on the motherboard to work out what type of chip is used, and then work out what module to load from there. Once you know this and you've used whatever tool Mandrake provides to setup hardware (I can't help here - I'm from the Slackware camp) you'll want to post details back here about which cable modem service you are using. If its a BlueYonder/NTL offering then I can provide you with all the gen on that as I'm running a BY Cable modem at home...

cheers

Jamie...

PS - If you can't find the chip post the exact model of Dell and/or look on their website.

Hi,

The NIC is aparrently:
NIC: RJ45 connector (3Com 3C913 chip set)

http://support.dell.com/us/en/techfa...plex/20005.htm

I already have one NIC, (a card) which I'm using for my local BNC network, I just want to use the on board one (as opposed to buying another) to connect a BlueYonder cable modem...

I'm not that good at Linux at the moment... so... what do I do now to set up the on board NIC?

Thanks,

- Nick

You should be able to follow the same setup procedure as your first card I would expect to get the NIC working - try the '3c590/3c900 series (592/595/597) "Vortex/Boomerang"' module for that card (an educated guess - someone else may know better).

Once thats done and you've had your cable modem installed (to your Windows box - they won't install to the Linux box directly) you'll need to register the MAC address (unique hardware address) of the onboard NIC with Blueyonder's techsupport people. Then on the Windows box you'll want to release your DHCP lease (the installation engineer will be able to show you how), plug the cable modem into the onboard NIC on the linux box and run (assuming that your onboard nic is eth1 [you can control this if you want by passing kernel parameters or just by loading the modules in the order you want the cards to come up, so load the module for your existing card before the onboard one])

dhcpcd -i eth1

to attempt to get an IP address from their DHCP server. If this doesn't work don't panic - when I got my cable modem installed I had a bastard-nightmare getting it working, and in the end swapped the network cards around. It turned out that at the time Blueyonder's DHCP server didn't respond to the message from Windows to release the DHCP lease, and until this happens the server won't respond to your requests for another IP address, hence it appears that something is wrong. If this happens you need to wait for the lease to expire. This will take 24-hours, then try the dhcpcd line again.

Once you get your lease from the DHCP server then you're away!! You'll want to look into setting up somekind of firewall (check out the Security forum, I'm sure Raz can offer some comprehensive solutions for you). I take it that you are going to setup the Dell box to connect all your other machines to the web yeah?? If this is the case then you'll also want to look into IP-Masquerading (or NAT as its called outside the Linux community). Have a look at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO.html and again search the forum for other's problems and solutions.

good luck, its not as bad as its sounds!

cheers

Jamie...

something's been stumping me in Linux. Given that you know the hardware type and model that you are using (Ex: Realtek 8139 chipset 10/100 Mb NIC) how does one determine which modules to enable in the kernel config? I notice some cryptic module types in there, such as tulip, etc...

so the question is, how can you determine the module feature to enable in the kernel to support 'X' model of hardware if the names don't seem to match?

When you do your make config (or menuconfig or xconfig) on the kernel there is help available on all the modules, this normally includes a description of what's supported, however typically it is in the name of the module. So to use your example, RealTek 8139 based NICs have 'rtl8139' stamped on the main chip, and the name of the module you using is rtl8139 (just to confuse matters there is 8139too also, but that metioned in the help for the first module)

There are lists of compatible hardware out on the web, I imagine that these would list which module to use too.

HTH

Jamie...

Awesome. Thanks.
But again, how does the Tulip modules fit into things?

Originally posted by sancho5 But again, how does the Tulip modules fit into things?

tulip.o is the module for NICs based on Digital's Tulip chip... Easy eh!

cheers

Jamie...

erm.. yeah, it does. I for some reason thought it was some cryptic, unrelated chip. Doh.

Hi,

Linux now recognises both cards...

Do I need to put:
dhcpcd -i eth1
in rc.local to run at boot?

- Nick