Problem with 3C503 card with ISC Unix 2.2

[Michael J. Hammel]

In article <ERICF.91Apr3183545 at montreux.ai.mit.edu>,
ericf at zurich.ai.mit.edu (Eric Feigenson) writes: 
> Problem: This machine can 'ping' itself, but can't seem to talk to the
> rest of our network.  'ping'ing it from other machines yields no
> response, either.  This hardware configuration used to work with Intel
> Unix 1.0, but isn't working with this ISC setup.  We've tried every
> interrupt address we can think of.  We *really* need this machine to
> be talking to other machines on the net using TCP.

I'm not sure what has changed in ISC's 2.2 version but I have used their
2.0.2 and their TCP/IP 1.2 and 1.1.2 packages.  The following applies to
them and, I would guess, is roughly applicable to their 2.2 package.

Pinging the localhost does not require accessing the network card.  The
network software will use loopback mode (I believe) which does not need
to see or know about the network card.  Thats why you can ping
"localhost" and your local systems name and still not be able to get to
the rest of the network.  The former two will tell you if your
networking software is up (basically).

Check ifconfig el0 (if this is the only card in the system; if its not,
then grep for "ifconfig" in /etc/netd.cf and run ifconfig for each
device you see listed there).  If it comes back with a display of what
your IP address is and your netmask and broadcast address then the card
is there and the system knows about it.  If it doesn't come back with
this info then the system never saw the card when the system came up.

If it doesn't know the card is there you need to check that the card's
jumpers match what has been set in /etc/conf/sdevice.d/el.  I use
interrupt 5, I/O address 280 or 300, and a shared memory address of
dc000 and this usually doesn't conflict with anything (your mileage may
vary).  If they do match then did you build a kernel with that setting? 
If you did, and you installed that kernel, then I'm not sure where to go
from there.  It could be a bad card, but often times its just a
configuration problem.  

> 
> Does anyone have any ideas of what we could try to make this work?  Is this
> a problem with ISC's Unix?  Is this a problem with us :-?

Just a matter of getting all things in their proper order (well, usually
anyway ;-)

Michael J. Hammel        | mjhammel@{Kepler|socrates|feynman}.dell.com
Dell Computer Corp.      | {73377.3467|76424.3024}@compuserve.com
#include <disclaim/std>  | zzham at ttuvm1.bitnet 
"We choose to do this not because it is easy but because it is hard." J.F.K.