I installed a 2nd NIC in the Pentium 233 MMX box that will be a Router/Firewall, between the Internet and our home LAN. Both Windows 98 Second Edition and Gentoo Linux (on a Live CD) detected both NICs on IRQ 10. To me, that seems like it may be a problem. Is it a problem? The cards are both Netgear: FA310TX and FA311. Windows also showed on IRQ 10: (a) Intel 82371SB PCI to Universal Host Controller (b) IRQ holder for PCI steering and (c) IRQ holder for PCI steering. My notes show that I previously had installed a Netgear FA311, in another box, on IRQ 3. Microsoft System Information shows these IRQ's are free: 3, 5 and 9. Should I force one of the NIC's onto another IRQ? TIA!

Should not be a problem. PCI allows multiple devices to same IRQs. ISA only really allows a single device to have the IRQ. One way to maybe to get it a different IRQ is move one of the nics to a different PCI slot. All one can is try it and see if there are any problems with the same brand model nics using the same IRQ. The only issue I had with the same nics was with a spefic kernel version like 2.2.16 with 3com nics. One worked fine. turned up the second one and the networked drag bad. Ended up compiling a newer kernel becuase that was one of the fixes in the changelog of the kernel.

Brian1

Brian: Thank you for your reply! Saturday morning, I moved the 3 PCI cards into different slots. I got lucky, the first time, and the 2 NICs are now on different IRQs. Before, there were 3 free IRQs. Now, there is only 1. So, this time, the Plug & Play BIOS did a better job of allocating the resources. Lanny

Glad to be of help there Lanny.

Brian1