Hi,

I've been working on a project of mine that takes a SparcStation 20, Debian, a 2.4.27 SMP kernel and a quad ethernet card into a hardened firewall/gateway. Up till now i've just been working with the built-in 10Mbit Lance ethernet, but recently got a hold of the 10/100 quad ethernet card. My problem right now is this:

On bootup, the sunhme module detects the card's four ports and loads correctly

sunhme.c:v2.01 26/Mar/2002 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com)
eth0: Quattro HME slot 0 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:30
eth1: Quattro HME slot 1 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:31
eth2: Quattro HME slot 2 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:32
eth3: Quattro HME slot 3 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:33
eth0: Link is up using internal transceiver at 100Mb/s, Full Duplex.

then, in my /etc/network/interfaces file, i have this:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.0.11
netmask 255.255.255.0

auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
address 192.168.0.12
netmask 255.255.255.0

auto eth3
iface eth3 inet static
address 192.168.0.13
netmask 255.255.255.0

eventually the other ports will be DHCP as well, but for simplicity's sake, i'm leaving them static for now. now i've been trying to get this system to obtain an address from my existing gateway that runs a DHCP3 daemon. here is this client's /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf setup:

# Configuration file for /sbin/dhclient, which is included in Debian's
# dhcp3-client package.
#
# This is a sample configuration file for dhclient. See dhclient.conf's
# man page for more information about the syntax of this file
# and a more comprehensive list of the parameters understood by
# dhclient.
#
# Normally, if the DHCP server provides reasonable information and does
# not leave anything out (like the domain name, for example), then
# few changes must be made to this file, if any.
#
send host-name "stephanie.homelinux.org";
#send dhcp-client-identifier 1:0:a0:24:ab:fb:9c;
#send dhcp-lease-time 3600;
#supersede domain-name "fugue.com home.vix.com";
#prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
Domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name;

#require subnet-mask, domain-name-servers;
#timeout 60;
#retry 60;
#reboot 10;
#select-timeout 5;
#initial-interval 2;
#script "/etc/dhcp3/dhclient-script";
#media "-link0 -link1 -link2", "link0 link1";
#reject 192.33.137.209;

#alias {
# interface "eth0";
# fixed-address 192.5.5.213;
# option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
#}

#lease {
# interface "eth0";
# fixed-address 192.33.137.200;
# medium "link0 link1";
# option host-name "stephanie.homelinux.org";
# option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
# option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255;
# option routers 192.33.137.250;
# option domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
# renew 2 2000/1/12 00:00:01;
# rebind 2 2000/1/12 00:00:01;
# expire 2 2000/1/12 00:00:01;
#}

and the resulting error message i get is this:

stephanie:~# ifup eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.2
Copyright 2004 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP

Listening on LPF/eth0/08:00:20:cc:e2:30
Sending on LPF/eth0/08:00:20:cc:e2:30
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
Failed to bring up eth0
stephanie:~#

and yet if i dmesg it, it tells me that eth0 link is up:

stephanie:~# dmesg | tail
Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
esp0: target 6 asynchronous
sr0: scsi-1 drive
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
sunhme.c:v2.01 26/Mar/2002 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com)
eth0: Quattro HME slot 0 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:30
eth1: Quattro HME slot 1 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:31
eth2: Quattro HME slot 2 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:32
eth3: Quattro HME slot 3 (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:cc:e2:33
eth0: Link is up using internal transceiver at 100Mb/s, Full Duplex.
stephanie:~#

i can even see the link light on my switch blink when it sends out a dhcp request, but then immediately quits as shown above.

any insight into this would be much appreciated...

--Zerg4141

It's not correct (althought possible) to have 4 interfaces on the same subnet. If you want all 4 "ports" (can't say cards here gnehehe) you should make a bridge.
Because of routing, it will be quite tricky to make your 4 interfaces to work on the same subnet without a bridge, you will need advanced routing and some hardcore iptables rules at very least.

Think about it... routing work about subnet by default, so you have 4 "routes" about 192.168.0.0/24 subnet (route -n if you want to check). If this computer receive a packet for the 192.168.0.0 subnet, where (to which interfaces) should it send the packet? At the very least, you will have to make 4 routes about ip address instead of subnet. And it will not work very well...

I have the (almost) same settings at home, as my router is a P120Mhz with 7 ethernet ports (3 "usual" cards and a quad one), all the interfaces relative to the quad are bridged and the "bridged" interface has his own subnet.

well i hadn't thought about that one, and i assigned eth[1-3] different addresses and netmasks, but to no avail. i'll have to remember that in the future, but right now i'm guessing it is my dhcp client setup because when i set eth0 to a static ip, i can ping other machines connected to the switch.

do i need to setup the dhclient.conf file for seperate interfaces?

--Zerg4141

It's hard to tell, I have no idea what you network look like... but if your DHCP server can answer on several interfaces, it will most likely cause problem... if, let's say, "eth1" try to find the DHCP and that the DHCP server answer on eth0... well, it will not work, eth0 will drop the trafic and eth1 will not receive anything so it will call again and again.

An easy tweak would be to call one interface by one interface... mean, "down" (ifconfig ethX down) each interface before calling the dhcp server, and user the "-i" (ex : dhclient -i eth0 ) flag to make sure your dhcp client doesn't "wake" all interface at once. Once all interfaces wil have an ip address, if you update the routing table carefully (to make sure it only route to indivudual ip instead of having 4 routes to the same subnet), it should work.

well i just went ahead and commented out eth[1-3] so as to simplify matters. i still am having the same problem though...it appears to be dhcp related, but with the other ports commented out, i don't know why it isn't responding like it should. i also did a little sniffing with ethereal, and found that the card is sending out a request from a source address of 0.0.0.0

is that normal? i know it isn't when an ethernet card has had addresses assigned to it in the past, but in this case, this card has never been given a lease, so it doesn't have a past address to fall back on.

--Zerg4141

Strange... is the DHCP server an unix box? If so, do you see anything odd in the log files, about DHCP request?
Also, on the client, do you see something in the log? Is the client ever receive an answer? The 0.0.0.0 request is normal, DHCP should use the MAC address to find where to send back, as you should never has an address at this time.

well, i figured out how to fix it. I was playing around with different debian packages and such, and discovered that the problem goes away when using dhcp client v.2 rather than v.3 which all my other linux boxes use. I don't understand why yet, but i know that with v.3, it wasn't getting any sort of dhcp_request out and would quit by the time the server was ready to offer an address.

anyways, this is what i experienced. if anyone else has had an issue with dhcp3 similar to this let me know and we can collaborate.

--Zerg4141

weird... I can't test on my own "quad eth" box, it is indeed a debian box but it acts as the DHCP server on the network, so...

If you find some clue about it, let me know.

Have anyone got experience using HP A5506-60102 Quad network card in Linux?

DEC chip 21142/43 (rev41) it works both in Windows and Linux

the following commands already in the Linux, no installation required