I have SuSE 9.1 Personal and installed Cisco VPN client for Linux. I was having intermittant issues connecting. Cisco support tells me that the tg3 network driver is known to be buggy with their software. They recommended that I use the bcm5700 driver instead.

I downloaded bcm5700 and installed.
ifdown eth0
rmmod tg3
modprobe bcm5700
ifup eth0

The Cisco VPN client for Linux now works great.

How do make this change permanent so I do not have to run all these commands every session?

I do not see the bcm5700 while in Yast to select it as a permanent change.

By the way, Linux already has me hooked........

The loading of modules in Redhat type distributiions is in /etc/modules.conf. Edit the file and save it with your new information. Put a # on the line with the module you no longer want to load.

My /etc/modules.conf file is empty (0 bytes). Any ideas?

Sometimes when you speak without having a machine in front of you, you end up screwing up. I'm at home now. You would put the change in /etc/modprobe.conf

Thanks for your time. When I look at the modprobe.conf file I do not have any driver specific entries. There's an entry "install eth0 /bin/true" but nothing related to the old tg3 driver which continues to get loaded each time I start the system up.

Per the Broadcom docs for the bcm5700 driver it states to put an "alias eth0 bcm5700" in the modules.conf file. This file was originally empty but I put it there anyway. It did not work. I tried putting the alias in the modprobe.conf file above the install eth0 line but that did not work either.

Each time I boot I'm stuck with the tg3 driver until I manually rmmod and modprobe the new bcm5700 driver.

Does this make sense?

The modules.conf directory is where I sent you to initially. Unfortunately, every distribution is slightly different. That's why I modified my answer when I got home. Suse has quite good hardware detection, so it produces a file automatically called modprobe.conf. In my /etc/modprobe.conf file I have (toward the bottom) an entry showing a commented out prototype:
#alias eth0 nvnet
make a copy of the line, remove the # to uncomment it, and substitute your driver for the nvnet
alias eth0 bcm5700

Good luck.

You can use yast and select advanced and enter the module there, or if you want to edit it command line wise,
cd /etc/sysconfig/hardware, find the file that looks like
hwhwcfg-bus-pci-0000:00:12.0 and change the module there. Then run SuSEconfig

Thanks to both of you for your help.

The tweaking of the file in /etc/sysconfig/hardware and running SuSEconfig did the trick.

JVK....