[lug] RedHat LAN comm problem

[George Hyatt]

I'm having an problem getting RedHat 7.2 set up for use in a simple test
project.  I could sure use some help!

The test machines are 100 MHz Pentium jobs, with AM79C961A PCnet-ISA II
LAN controller chips on the motherboard.  The RedHat install did not
automatically set up any ethernet driver module.  RedHat site suggested
the "lance" kernel module for this chip, a descendant of the original
AM7990 LANCE.  modprobe apparently succeeds using the example parameters
provided on the RedHat site, so I added that to /etc/modules.conf
("alias eth0 lance", and "options lance io=0x320 irq=5 dma=3"), and set
address and netmask via netconfig utility.  This seemed to work OK, with
eth0 initialized at boot, no errors reported (that I saw). ifconfig
indicates eth0 up and running, and the Lance turns on the link light at
the ethernet switch.  route reports the usual set of three routes,
including the critical one onto the local net (192.168.1.0, netmask
255.255.255.0, via eth0).

But when I actually try to use the LAN, other hosts on the local net
report the test host unreachable.  When I try to ping out of the test
host, no packets go out via eth0.  Before & after ifconfig results
indicate that the ping packets are being routed to lo0, not eth0,
despite the specified routes!  WTF?

Please advise:  What did I configure wrong?  fail to configure?

TIA -

George Hyatt
ghyatt at creativeconsulting.com