Re: Kernels not recognising my net adapter

[Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>]

On 1/19/2000 12:03 PM john.king@ucl.ac.uk Dr John King wrote:
>I have a working diskless setup using Mandrake 6.1 as a basis. ... 
>I have successfully compiled a number of new kernels both from stable and
>development sources.  However, they all suffer from the same problem -
>during boot they complain that the checksum of the network card's EEPROM is
>wrong, quoting a MAC address of 00 00 00 00 00 00 (...however many 00s).

Sounds like the kernel has an outdated driver for the Ethernet card you 
are using.  What kind of card is it exactly?  If Etherboot can detect it 
and get its MAC address, then the kernel should be able to as well.  If 
this is a tulip clone card, for example, make sure the version of the 
kernel driver (/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/tulip.c) is .91g or better.  I 
had to do this.  Without knowing the card, it's hard to be more 
specific...

>At that point it can't start bootp so the whole thing falls over.  I have a
>working kernel, which does recognise the MAC address correctly, so what can
>have gone wrong here?  Could it be to do with upgrading some library
>somewhere, or is it to do with a setting in the .config?  I'm stumped.

What kind of machine (processor-type, speed, bus) are you running?  The 
Mandrake distribution is more particular than some in what it will 
support in terms of hardware.  Nothing short of a Pentium/K6 will do, if 
I remember correctly.  I use Red Hat mostly.  You might consider 
downloaded a kernel source RPM from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/ and seeing if 
that builds better.  (or check out http://www.cheapbytes.com/ where you 
can get Red Hat 6.1 for 3.49$US :-) (I can build a kernel to your 
specifications for testing, if you wish).

>(as a corollary, does anyone know why mandrake source kernels won't boot
>with loadlin?)

I don't know, but it might be worth sending mail to (or perusing the 
archives of) the Mandrake support list about this.  I'm sure you're not 
the first person to have this problem. 

Hope this is helpful,

Regards,

Marty

---
   Name: Martin D. Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
  Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 
  Email: mdc@thinguin.org
    Web: http://www.thinguin.org/


===========================================================================
This Mail was sent to netboot mailing list by:
Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>
To get help about this list, send a mail with 'help' as the only string in
it's body to majordomo@baghira.han.de. If you have problems with this list,
send a mail to netboot-owner@baghira.han.de.