Don't go buying new cards quite yet...
Well, if you are using edx driver, you are apparently using an NE2000, or SMC8xxx
or similar card. You have never stated what you are using or what settings, but
the edx driver narrows it down. These cards have VERY specific settings for I/O
address, Interupt and (if applicable) shared memory. The shared memory
requirement is not listed in the docs, at least that I have found. However, by
experiementation, I found the following combinations:
If you are using an NE2000 compatable card, the settings are:
ed0: 280/10
ed1: 300/5
ed2: 320/11
(the rest is in the manual, page 56)
HOWEVER, if you are using SMC 8216 or other SMC cards WITH shared memory (if you
have a choice, don't!), or you have an NE2000 compatable with shared memory
option enabled (again, I'd recommend against) you have to set the shared memory
properly, too. This, I couldn't find in the docs (actually, the docs incorrectly
say the SMC8216 (SMC Elite Ultra) uses the de driver. This is incorrect, it is
the ed driver), but found through trying things and closely inspecting the error
messages:
(io / irq / memory)
ed0: 280/10/D8000
ed1: 300/5/DA000
ed2: 320/11/DC000
the rest is left to a reader with more interest...
NOTE! ed1 and ed0 conflict, at least with the SMC8216 (which has a 16k shared
memory address). Other edx series NICs may have smaller shared memory locations,
and may not be a problem.
Anyway, to your problem...
If you are getting DEVICE timeouts (as opposed to PING timeouts), you most likely
have the wrong interrupt set on the NIC. GNATbox picks these combinations, you
must adjust your cards accordingly! If you are also using this machine as a
Windows 9x box, you may well have hardware which conflicts with the card settings
GNATbox wants, for example, IRQ5 may be used by a sound card, so either you must
move the sound card or not use the ed1 device (note: you can "skip" device
numbers, my GNATbox has ed0 and ed2, and of course, you can mix types of NICs.).
Obviously, in a dedicated firewall, there is no point for a sound card, so you
would be best advised to strip the machine down to its bare minimum, which does
wonderous things for freeing up IRQs and other resources. Some sound cards can
cause real problems, taking up anywhere between one and four interrupts.
It doesn't take much operating to ping your own machine. The hardware really
isn't very involved. It really doesn't tell you much.
If this doesn't help, give us some concrete details, like what kind of cards,
what their settings are, what other things are in the box, etc.
Nick.
rich hurd wrote:
> I went back to the log screen after a 'ping' and it reports that ed1 has a
> device timeout. :-{(
>
> Any ideas? It's an old 16-bit ISA card; should I just whip out the Amex and
> buy a new network card? Or is there a software tweak I can try?
>
