I could use some help and/or pointers with a problem I have, and cannot solve.
I recently came into possession of an old DEC Alpha XLT-300. I brushed the dust off and fired it up and it worked fine. I then loaded the most recent version of Debian (2.2r2) for the Alpha on it and proceeded to experiment. Everything worked fine and as advertised, but the built-in 10 Mbs ethernet NIC did not match the rest of my home network, and I decided to add a second NIC. That is where the problem started. I cannot get the second 100 Mbs NIC to work. The first added NIC I tried had a Realtek 8139 chipset. The computer would recognize it and it would work for about 10 seconds before it would cause a kernel panic and a hard freeze requiring a push of the reset button to reconver. Right after the hard freeze-up the console window would be filled with error messages about kernel panic and an inability to synch with the interrupt handler. I have tried re-compiling the kernel and modules to remove any extraneous modules and specify that I was using the "Alcor" sub-type of the Alpha, and tried the various options in the PCI section of the kernel config. Nothing seems to work....the results were the same. I have tried the latest drivers for this card from Donald Becker's site without results too. The second additional NIC I tried was a Lynksys LNE100TX that purports to have a DEC "tulip" chipset, or derivitive. I had a bit more success here in that it works and sets up OK, BUT a "ping" from the Alpha machine brings up an error message indicating a bad CRC checksum and consistantly identifies byte 42 as being the "mangled" one. Needless to say I get a 100% packet loss. Strangely, if I ping the Alpha from another machine, it appears to respond correctly. Again I have tried various kernel configs and am currently using the latest "tulip" modules from Donald Becker's site. I do NOT get the hard freeze when using this NIC. During all of the above machinations, the "built-in" DEC Tulip-based 10 Mbs NIC continued to work flawlessly. My first thought was that this was something wrong in the "tulip" NIC module, but considering the fact that the "built-in" NIC works fine using the same module, I suspect it is something else. Considering the regularity of the location of the bad byte in the "ping" response, and the message I earlier got from the Realtek chip, I now suspect something is wrong elsewhere....perhaps in the interrupt handling routines?? At this point, I am at a loss as how to proceed. I am definately NOT a programmer or coder. I am just your basic "dabbler" trying to make something work that I think should work. I would appreciate any pointers as to how to proceed and/or where to look. The Alpha is NOT "mission-critical" to my home network. Cheers, & Thanks in advance for your time & consideration. -Don Spoon-
