Hi,

Having done some more debugging lateley this is what I have found some
_really_ strange 3c59x behavior when using bootnet.img from cooker
(dated 09-30, downloaded from ftp.sunet.se).

First a bit of background on what I'm doing and why. We currently have
77 pc's available to students in our computer labs, some of them run
only linux, some of them run only windows, and most of them are
dualbooted linux/windows. When installing i use kickstarted
mandrake+minor extensions of our own.

The only piece of hardware that is more-or-less identical on all our
machines is the network card, some kind of 3c905B, and hence I am quite
intrested in having a working 3c59x module on the bootnet.img diskette.

The problems seems to be related to some strange kind of bios/nic-model
combination. 

The most problems is on our new 466MHz machines. Then have an intel bx2
mobo and a 3c905b-mba network card. On thoose machines, it is
_impossible_ to get dhcp working after a warm reset, after a cold reset
it works most of the times, after hitting retry 1-7 (or sometimes more)
times. 

When it's not working and I'm running a snoop/tcpdumd session I can
clearly see how the client sits silent, doesn't send any dhcp requests
at all during the time the "Sending DHCP request" dialog is chown, and
ones the dialog "No dhcp replies recieved" pops up, some 5 dhcprequest
packets are sent at once, which all gets answered by the dhcp server, no
dhcpack replies from the client.

But after  1-7 retries it suddenly works, don't ask me why .....

On our oldest machines (p133's) the network card isn't found at all
after a warm reset, I can't even manally specify that it's a 3c905 card.
After a cold reset everything works like a charm on thoose machines.

On all other modells, all is fine, probing and dhcp.

Maybe this is out of the scope of the cooker mailing-list, feel free to
flame me. But since redhat-6.1's bootnet disk works just fine on all our
computers I think the bug is to be found in the mandrake bootnet.img
config.

Since I can kickstart all of our machines, I don't consider this to be a
major bug for us, it's just damm irritating having to press retry an
unknown number of times.

-- 
Niklas Paulsson                                   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
System Administrator at Dept. of Informatics , G�teborgs University  
"Linux isn't just an operating system: It's a way of life."  
- Andrew Leonard - Salon Magazine

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