N440BX with Pro100 embeded - solved

[Joao Rochate]

Hi to all..

I never posted a help message on this list.
Even so, I had this problem and have solved it. So, I'm going to share to
solution with people interested on the subject.

Scenario:
* Intel N440BX with EEPRO100B on-board, 2-Channel Symbios SCSI on-board,
video on-board. A Mylex DAC960 RAID card.
* Two Pentium III 450Mhz
* Two hubs 3Com: 10Mbps and 10/100Mbps
* RedHat Linux 6.0, kernel 2.2.5smp

Installed and sucessfuly detected the eepro card. Because of IO-APIC, the
IRQ for the NIC became IRQ20.

Problem:
When network was up, I could only ping when was connected to 100Mbps HUB.
But, ping'ing was very unstable and couldn't to an FTP connectio.
When connected to 10Mbps HUB, network was down.

After download to lastest version, recompile kernel (still with SMP),
change cables, it was the same situation.

Solution:
*Only* connect the NIC to a 10/100Mbps HUB.
*Disable* the IO-APIC on the Motherboard BIOS. So, the IRQ of the eepro NIC
became IRQ5.

Now everything works fine.

Bizarre, but OK :)

Cheers,
                                Joao Rochate

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Joao Pedro Rochate         | EMail: jrochate@ualg.pt
Servicos de Informatica    | URL: w3.ualg.pt/~jrochate
Universidade do Algarve    | Phone: +351 (0)89  800 961
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P O R T U G A L     (pt)   | GSM:   +351 (0)931 950xxxx
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Eng. de Sistemas e Computacao - UCEH - Univ. do Algarve