Hi, I have a couple of quick questions. I have recently purchaced an alpha pws500a. I finally managed to get debian installed on it, but I seem to be having trouble with the network.
Looking throught dmesg I can see that the ethernet device is found and started properly, and throught ifconfig eth0 i can see that the ip/netmask and such are configured correctly, but i cannot ping anyone else on the network here. I have a couple of different computers on a local network. They all have ip address in the 192.168.18.0 network, and all have the default netmask (255.255.255.0). No problems with the regular pcs here, they can ping each other fine. However, the alpha refuses to work. It can ping itself fine (192.168.18.48; which i suppose means the ethernet works somewhat), but cannot ping the gateway (192.168.18.135) or another workstation (18.45). In addition to this, the ethernet device continually sends out packets, even when no net traffic is (or at least shouldn't be) used. I tried unplugging all other cables except the server and the alpha, but the traffic did not stop (I thought perhaps there might be some kind of interference). Also, when the cable is removed from the alpha when the ethernet has not been shut down, it continually spits out errors on STDOUT, which is pretty annoying, espessially when your trying to install debian, and the ethernet hasn't been configured yet :) I've read throught the documentation for the network source in the linux kernel souce documentation (only for the kernel that potato shipped with though, i havent had a chance to look through the documentation for the 2.4 kernel series... yet). I couldn't find much info helpfull, only for boot options if you want to use the coax connection. Are there known problems with the ethernet cards on pws500a (driver is de4x5), or can i just chalk this one up to being jumbled around in shipping too much? Now for the second part, going by the compaq page: http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/workstations/retired/aseries/techspecs.html i see that the workstation uses ecc memory. I've done a quick search on the net for prices (i would like to upgrade by about 256M) and the prices seem to be equal to regular SDRAM. My question is: Will the alpha support 'generic' ecc ram, and if so, at what speeds (100, 133...). If not, does anyone know of a nice (fairly cheap) online shop to purchase some ram at. I understand most people wont just have this info sitting in their head, so if you dont know, but have some links to some info that might just be helpfull, I sure would appreciate it. Thanks in advance, -- You will be awarded some great honor. Jonathan Nelson [icq=56665957] [aim=ciasaboark]
