Re: [9fans] 3c509b troubles

["michael block" <michaelmuffin@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
>> a windows machine with isa slots will be available to me on tuesday.
>> i'll try this out and see what happens. of course a better solution
>> would be to just fork over the cash for a better card...
>
> Where can you even buy an ISA Ethernet (or any) card these days? I don't
> even see them on Ebay or Craiglist these days.

there's no reason it needs to be isa, i have pci slots too. it's just
the only card i have that qualifies as plan 9 supported hardware

> As far as ISA Ethernet cards
> go, in my experience the '509 was one of the most reliable ones ever made.
> In the early 1990s I deployed several hundred of these in various university
> workstation labs running Windows 3.11 and BSD/OS, and they just plain
> worked.

i wouldn't say it's a bad card, just that from what i read in the
9fans archives it seems to be troublesome on plan 9 for some reason.
i've used the same card on openbsd with no problem

> Referring to an earlier message in this thread, the string 'irq=nn' on the
> ether0= line in the .ini file just tells the kernel what IRQ to speak to the
> card on. It doesn't actually re-configure the card to use that IRQ. (The
> original message was a bit ambiguous about this.)

ha! well that certainly explains a lot! like i said, i don't know what
i'm doing. thanks, that really helped

-- m