You didn't bother to mention even what bus your NICs work with, much
less what models and makes, so you leave us guessing, but...

1) IRQ.  If ISA cards going into a PCI machine, you need to make sure
the IRQs used by your NICs need to be left open for the ISA bus in the
BIOS.

2) *SOME* IBMs have very weird ISA bus timing (I think).  I have had
horrible problems getting any ISA NICs to work in some 486 based
systems -- I believe I finally got an SMC8216 to work when a Microdyne
or Eagle NE2000Plus wouldn't.  This was under DOS, even -- similar
results more recently with 3c509Bs -- the computer actually seemed to
scramble the cards settings, rendering them unusable.  Can't say if
this problem extends to the Pentium class IBMs or not.

3) Shared memory (used on very few NICs) and something in the upper
memory area (caching, shadowing, etc.) conflicting with the NICs.

Nick.



john wrote:
> My reliable 486 recently died and i was going to replace it
> with a IBM Aptiva pentium 133 model 2176-C33 i took the
> nics out and put them in the IBM and on boot-up i get an error
> "nat error: unable to malloc active tunnels" it continues the
> boot pocess but it obviously dont work i took the cards and
> disk threw them in an old Packard Bell P100 and it works fine
> any thoughts on whats causing the error? Id rather use the IBM
> if i could.
> Thanks

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