I have Red Hat 6.2 installed on an old 486 system. All is up and running fine except for my network card. It's a 3com 3c509. I think there is some odd conflict between my NIC and the Sound Blaster 16 card that is also in the system. When the sound card isn't in the system the NIC gets an IP just fine. As soon as I put the sound card in I can't get an IP anymore. I can load the module for the card, just can't get an IP from my router. There isn't an IRQ conflict as far as I know. The NIC is on 10, the SB16 is on 5. I would just take the sound card out, but the cd-rom is connected to it. Any help would be appreciated.

Easiest solution would be get new cdrom drive. However that is not the one you want so I would suggest looking at the memory requests and the DMA #s. It could be having a conflict with the sound card but just not on the IRQs. I have seen this happen with other devices even in M$ software.

Juggle the IRQ's anyway. Try forcing the nic to 7, if that's unused.

modprobe 3c509 irq=7

But you probably knew that. In one old 486dx/6 machine we couldn't get the card to work (the module would load, and "dmesg" found the card), unless it was on irq 7. Maybe the same voodoo will work.

Cheers,

Finegan

No success on changing the IRQs around. Got the same results no matter what I changed it to. Doesn't look like there are any conflicts with DMAs or memory requests either as bbenz3 suggested. I appreciate the help so far. Let me know if you have any other ideas on this.

What type of slot do the soundcard and NIC plug into (ISA, PCI)?

Both are ISA cards.

When I'm dealing with ISA cards on a PCI-capable machine, I find it helps to go into the bios and reserve IRQ's for those cards to make sure PCI devices don't step on them.

The motherboard is quite old. All the slots are ISA. The only reserved IRQs in the BIOS are 4 and 7, which shouldn't be causing a problem.