I don't know about using as many as 5, but I have successfully used 3 of the 3C509 NICs with Dachstein. I haven't tried the same config with Bering yet, but I would not expect the situation to be any different.
No special tricks with the drivers were required, a single instance of the standard driver detected and initialized all 3 NICs. It was necessary to use the DOS utility provided by 3COM (3C5x9cfg.exe) to configure each NIC with unique IRQ and I/O addresses. The same utility can be used to disable PNP support in the 3C509B NICs. (Turning off PNP support in the motherboard BIOS might be a good idea as well.) As far as I know, the original 3C509 NIC did not support PNP. Note that you do not need to actually install all of the 3COM tools on the LEAF system to accomplish this..... you can uncompress the files to a temporary folder on another machine, and just copy the 3C5x9cfg.exe utility to a bootable DOS disk. While you are at it, if the NICs you are using support multiple transceiver types, now is the time to select which one you intend to use.... most users will only be interested in 10Base-T. When I get a chance, I'll try the same config with Bering to compare results. Hope this helps! -----original message below ------------- FROM: David SmeadDATE: 04/13/2002 21:42:51SUBJECT: RE: [Leaf-user] tulip problems Thanks for your help, but I'm about ready to buy some new hardware. I have 5 of the 3C509B NICs. I downloaded the 3Com PNP tools which are a self expanding .exe. That didn't do me any good, because it expects to have a hard drive in the system for the expansion. I really don't want to install M$ on a hard drive!! But I discovered the isapnp site, ock.demon.co.uk/isapnptools/ and from there found a dos version that lets me boot dos, then swap disks and run a couple of tools to configure the cards. The tools say they configure with the io and irqs that I set. However, that doesn't work with Bering. I still get just two interfaces instead of four. I've tried linking to 3c509.o to make it look like I have another driver, and I've copied 3c509.o to another filename and listed that in /etc/modules and I still get operation not supported by device. I have a couple of other old NICs that aren't PNP, but without enough information to know what driver they take. I don't want to waste a good machine for a firewall, but it's looking more like that will have to be done. How is everyone else handling more than two interfaces? _______________________________________________ Leaf-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user
