[vortex] 10Base2 on 3Com 3C590-C

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Aaron Ault wrote:

> because when I enable the 590-C to try across 10Base2, the  
> 905C stops working (yeah, dislexics beware :).

But in this situation does the 590-C work over 10Base2 ? Or is the 
following paragraph describing this situation:

> Also, when I try to ping from one computer to the other, I can see
> arp requests for the address of the destination computer, but it
> never replies so the ping fails.

How did you check this ? Did you run tcpdump/ethereal on the 2 
computers ? While ping-ing do you see the number of interrupts 
increasing in /proc/interrupts and/or the number of errors increasing 
in /proc/net/dev ?

> When I plug an RJ45 crossover cable into the RJ45 jack on the 590-C,  
> everything works fine (there are replies to the ping).  This is why I  
> suspect that the code for the 10Base2 link may be out of date or too  
> up-to-date for the card.

That code was not really modified for several years. However, there
was recently a change that broke 10Base2 which was fixed only 2-3
weeks ago - I don't quite know what "recently" means as I haven't
followed it too closely, so it might be that the driver that you are
using is affected. Could you try using a more recent kernel,
preferably 2.6.16 or newer ? Or at least take the driver and compile 
it against your 2.6.12 kernel ?

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu at IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De