The new server the company bought has this new wiz bang uber nic in it. And it's driving me up the wall. I'm running 2.4.22 of the kernel and it doesn't recognize that the nic is present. It's built into the mother board. The bios on the system recognizes the card is there and functioning but it won't let me define it.

I tried to do a modprobe bcm5700 per the mfg website and it failed.

I'm running Mandrake Linux 9.2...er excuse me Mandriva Linux 9.2. If anybody has a hint or a glimmer of a hint on this one I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks
M. Lacy
Western Tool Supply.

Sounds like your older kernel doesn't support this new hardware. Is there a reason you need to run an older kernel? To test this, get a copy of knoppix 3.8.1. It runs the 2.6.11 kernel I think. If the NIC shows up there, you'll know you need an upgrade.

http://www.knoppix.org/

Unfortunately, we are stuck with the older kernel for now. That's as a result of a custom application who's compiler isn't availible for the newer kernels yet. I'd wait for the compiler for our code to become availible but the powers that be corporate wise want this system up and running and functional immediately.

Also, we now have a significant install base of about 70 servers running this kernel. It would literally be a nightmare to maintain multiple sets of code one for the warehousing system and one for the stores and probably a third for the admin system. Our problem is a very small IT team there's 3 of us in the US and 2 more in Canada and we do the set, configuration, application programming, systems programming and system administration for 3 sco unix systems, 3 warehouse servers running linux, 70 store servers running linux and about 300 windoze boxes running 98, 2000 and XP pro and one AIX server and 2 windoze 2000 back office junkpiles...er servers.

That's a drag. You could still boot the knoppix CD, and see if it does recognize your new network card. Chances are you'll just have to disable it, and install a NIC you know will work....maybe a 3C905 or something.

Well, the work around was to drop in a plain old NIC which isn't a gigabit card but I was able to configure my setup. I'll do a test install with 10.1 and see if that goes any better on the next one I configure. I have to set up 3 of these servers for our warehouses. It turns out that we needed a bit more horse power for the warehouses than we did in the stores. On the warehouse servers we did bump them up to 512 MB ram which is pretty smokin for an init 3 linux box. The problem is that once we did that we found out that we were disk bound. So now we have these servers with a really sweet hardware raid in them so hopefully we'll be running smooth now.