Linux help needed - finding NICs with linux routers

[indd]

What I'm trying to do is get a Linux router program installed on an older system, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting anything working. Right now I have ICS working on my computers, but I want something better..

So far I've tried both smoothwall and freesco, and both programs have trouble finding the NIC's in two computers that I've tried. They're both older computers. One is a p100 and the other is a p133 (zenith brand). Both of these have ISA NE2000-compatible NICs. My secondary NIC that I've tried in both is a DLink 530+. On either one, both programs can't seem to find ANY NICs on bootup with either computer. I'm guessing since people have linux working on 486's and stuff that it's operator error here, and I'm not sure how to go about fixing this. I've tried looking at the PnP-HOWTO, but it didn't say all that much. Right now in BIOS PnP OS is NOT installed, but it doesn't work.

Anyone else have similar problems? My next step is to try downloading a big linux distro and see if one of those can detect the hardware..

Thanks for any help..
indd

 

[sduguid]

I haven't tried those distros so I don't know how good they are at detecting hardware. When I was setting up a Linux router a few years ago, I had to do a couple of different things that may apply to your case. I had a couple of ISA PNP nics that would let me set jumpers so the PNP was disabled. Usually, the jumpers gave you the choice of which irq to use. On 3com ISA PNP cards, I believe you have to download a dos utility which can enable/disable ISA PNP. Any distro such as Mandrake, redhat, etc...should automatically detect pci nics but perhaps the ones you are using still require you to enter the irq manually....

good luck

btw, there are several linux gurus here so hopefully they will drop in and help.

 

[LNXman]

You have to make sure you have isapnp enabled in your kernel, otherwise the cards will not initialize. You may want to research on isapnp tools, so that you understand how to set ISA support in older computers.

GL

 

[indd]

The NIC's that I'm working with don't have jumpers, so that kind of sucks. I'll look into isapnp some more, but if I remember back from my old school linux days (1.2.13) if something is compiled into the kernel, you have to recompile the whole kernel, right? I'm just worried that I won't be able to get a kernel that's small enough to fit onto the disk here.. and I don't have a working linux system either so I'll have to install one to make a new kernel..

I tried to use freesco on a different computer (k6-2 333) and it detected the linksys 10bt NIC in there (ne2k compatible), but didn't find the DLink card (which by the way apparently uses the rtl8139 driver). Seems like freesco works better with newer BIOS's.

All of this might not matter. I don't know for sure, but I don't think any linux routers currently support PPPoE right now anyways. There is a PPPoE package from www.roaringpenguin.com that looks cool, but unfortunately I wouldn't know how to set the computer up to route tcp/ip requests from other computers to the internet and back (basically, how to do NAT with linux?)..

For now I installed AnalogX's proxy with Win98SE, and it works for web stuff. Wish it could do more (than just news, e-mail, etc)!

Well, thanks again..
indd

 

[LNXman]

isapnp was not available with the 1.x kernels. It appeared around the 2.0.x-2.2.x kernels as a separate utility when pnp was becoming present a lot with ISA devices. this feature ultimately was embeded in the 2.4.x kernel source, but it is not necessarily compiled by default. You may have to compile it yourself.

To do a NAT with LINUX (2.4.x kernels) you have to research on iptables, and how to set up rules for NATting.

L8

 

[Iron Woode]

Just curious. Did you post this problem on the Freesco forums? If not, it might be a good idea.

 

[indd]

No, haven't posted on the freesco site.

I got the ISA NE card in the Zenith P133 computer to work using isapnp. The thing still wouldn't see that D-link card though for some reason. Right now my main computer (k6-2 333) is running AnalogX's proxy using both an old Linksys NE-chipset card and the Dlink. I tried to install Coyote Linux (which as PPPoE support built-in) and it detects the Linksys card fine. But when the kernel tries to load the rtl8139 driver for the Dlink it says something like "resource is busy" or something like that. This DLink card is such a pain! Anyone else get a D-Link TX530+ to work in linux?

Right now I'm going to try to find just another cheap ISA or PCI card and use the D-Link for windows only. The card hasn't worked with 3 distro's, so I'm guessing maybe something is wrong with this card (maybe it's just a problem with this particular NIC, or maybe just my older computers, I'm not sure)..

Other than that I'm going to try to build a system with IPFilter to learn firewalling some.. and use Coyote (if I can get it to work)..

Again, thanks for the help everyone..
indd