[lug] bizarre NIC problem.

[Jeff Howell]

Hey guys. I fought with a box for about 3 hours last night and finally had to
concede defeat.
I'm helping a newbie join the community. He's very literate. Got RedHat 6.1 and
X going by himself.
He is having a problem with a 3com 905c NIC. Here's the specs on the system.

ASUS P3B Mobo
NVidia GeForce video (32M SDR)
128M Ram
20G IDE HD.
3Com 905c NIC

Plugging into a 10/100 autonegotiating hub to a cisco 675 DSL connection.

He has the machine dual booted between Win2k and RH 6.1
Win2k sees the NIC fine. All is well. (So to speak)
Linux sees the NIC as well. The 3c59x module loads without any problems. Grabs
IRQ 10 and same IO as win2k.
after running ifconfig eth0 up  No link light. Run ifconfig. It sees the NIC and
displays the MAC etc...
Went to the vortex driver site that the driver points to. Not much help except
for listing the options for the module.

rmmod'd the module. ran insmod 3c59x option=<tried all of them on at a time>
thinking that the driver for some reason was not seeing the tx interface on the
nic. No change. tried setting various debug levels and no additional information
was returned in the messages file.

Downloaded and compiled the 3c90x module from 3com's web site. It won't see the
NIC at all. (Device or resource busy when trying to load it)

RedHat lists this as a supported NIC on their site although it says "Some people
had to disable autonegotiation" I figured specifying the interface with option=x
took care of that.

I personally have a 905b in my box and it runs like a champ.

Any ideas?

-- 
 Jeff Howell
 EDS Unix Support
 
  Linux Slackware: The Ultimate NT Service Pack