Hi, Regarding your NIC woes:
> I'm trying to get my 3Com 3c900B-TPO working under Debian 2.2.18pre21. > Here's what I've tried, and what I know, or think I know :P > > - Debian installer didn't detect the card. > - The card's not detected by Debian at boot (I found no 'eth0' in dmesg) > - 'ifconfig' lists only "lo" (local loopback?) > - 'ifconfig eth0 up' gives me "eth0 not found" > - but 'lspci' shows the card correctly as "02:09.0 Ethernet controller 3com > 3c900B-TPO" > - Plug 'n Pray is turned off in BIOS > > I tried to use linuxconf to set the 3c59x module, but that failed. It looks > like it created an "/etc/conf.modules" file, which Debian tells me is > deprecated. So no help there. Peripherally, is linuxconf a good thing to use > on Debian? Frankly, I don't know any other way of doing it. Maybe I am superstitious. I took one look at linuxconf sometime ago, and I am never going back there. A well worn linux system is just far too subtle a beast (too many possible configuration choices) that a hack like that could ever work. In comparison, consider the body of careful scripts and policy in debian to get packages to configure themselves and play together. Coming from RH myself I am pretty amazed at the level of careful policy in Debian. And yet ... it still doesn't always work. but back to your question... It seems clear that the first thing you must do is work out the module for the card. Of course you already know tha ;-(. But maybe you need some pointers to push modules in and out of a running kernel? After all probing cannot not always work. Another thing is that I observed the modules for my 3com NIC change name between 2.2 and 2.4 --- could that also be an issue here? A good source of info on the module to NIC mapping is the kernel documentation. On a Debian machine I tried the following searches (mind the fact that Debian docs are compressed) cd /usr/share/doc for f in ./kernel-doc-2.4.3/Documentation/networking/*.gz do if gunzip --stdout ${f} | grep -q -e '3c9' ; then echo ${f} fi done to get /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.4.3/Documentation/networking/vortex.txt.gz which talks about the 3c59x.c modules supporting a bunch of 3c900 NIC hardware. This looks like the module you had been using on RH. Maybe you had a 2.4 kernel there, or they had backported the driver. Anyhow looking in the 2.2 kernel documentation I instead find a match for /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.2.17/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt.gz definitely off topic ;-). You can also just look at the module names in /lib/modules/2.4.3/kernel/drivers/net/ and /lib/modules/2.2.17/net/ (substitute your own kernel version numers as applicable), and then just try inserting modules for the running kernel with commands like modprobe 3c59x and removing with modprobe -r 3c59x You can even pass parameters. As always see modprobe(8). Maybe some details will get logged to /var/log/messages et al. There are some parameters discussed in /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.4.3/Documentation/networking/vortex.txt.gz or by using modinfo(8) Maybe it is a matter of moving to a 2.4 kernel. You could do that via Adrian Bunk's potato packages. See: http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/debian/apt-sources/ Cheers and hope this helps a little