Very Computer

 Folks,

   Second attempt; don't think the last one went out.

   Curious if anyone has any idea what's going on here.
I picked up an old Seagate 50-pin SCSI-II drive for a
pittance to hook up to a BT-946C SCSI card that had
been sitting idle since the CD writer it was attached
to went belly-up.  I installed these into my "file
server" box, a dual PPro-200 running Debian 2.2r3.  I
recompiled the kernel with the only difference being
that I turned on SCSI support, specifically for the
Buslogic cards.  The card was identified OK on boot
and I was able to partitiion the drive and enable
some swap space on it (haven't built any filesystems
yet) so I'm fairly certain both drive and card are
working fine.

   The problem is that now my PCI ethernet card no
longer works.  It's a Netgear FA-310TX which has done
yeoman's duty since the day I bought it, though for
some odd reason it gets identified in the boot logs
for Debian 2.2r3 as a "Lite-On 82c168".  Doen't matter;
it worked just fine until I put the SCSI card into the
box.  Both SCSI card and network card are using IRQ 9,
with the SCSI card doing its I/O at 9400 and the net
card using 9800.  I've gone into the SCSI card setup
at boot time, and it will not allow me to modify the
IRQ value.  I'm unaware of any way to force the
network card to a different IRQ.  Can anyone make any
suggestions about where I could get started, here?
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought one of the points
of PCI was that you didn't have to worry (as much)
about IRQs and such; that the devices were capable of
sharing them, if necessary, and that the whole thing
was for the most part self-configuring.  So, what's
up?

   Other specs for the box, if anyone's interested:
Tyan ATX motherboard (1668D, I think), 128 MB of ECC
RAM, Matrox Mystique video card w/4MB RAM, and an old
OPL3-SAX sound card that doen't even get used, but I
never bothered pulling out of the machine.  Ultimately
I plan to make this box into a big RAID-5 file server
by slapping 3 Promise UATA-100 controllers into it,
replacing the FA-310TX with a DLink DFE-570TX, and
the Mystique with either an old Trident ISA video card
or just hooking an old serial terminal to the thing.
Then I'll hang 6 disks off the Promise controllers and
do RAID-5 across 'em.  But obviously this will involve
loading the box up with a lot of PCI cards, so I need
to get these issues resolved first.

best,
Jim Wiggs

Quote:> I picked up an old Seagate 50-pin SCSI-II drive for a pittance to hook
> up to a BT-946C SCSI card that had been sitting idle since the CD writer
> it was attached to went belly-up.  I installed these into my "file
> server" box, a dual PPro-200 running Debian 2.2r3.  I recompiled the
> kernel with the only difference being that I turned on SCSI support,
> specifically for the Buslogic cards.  The card was identified OK on boot
> and I was able to partitiion the drive and enable some swap space on it
> (haven't built any filesystems yet) so I'm fairly certain both drive and
> card are working fine.

>    The problem is that now my PCI ethernet card no
> longer works.  It's a Netgear FA-310TX which has done yeoman's duty
> since the day I bought it, though for some odd reason it gets identified
> in the boot logs for Debian 2.2r3 as a "Lite-On 82c168".  Doen't matter;
> it worked just fine until I put the SCSI card into the box.  Both SCSI
> card and network card are using IRQ 9, with the SCSI card doing its I/O
> at 9400 and the net card using 9800.  I've gone into the SCSI card setup
> at boot time, and it will not allow me to modify the IRQ value.  I'm
> unaware of any way to force the network card to a different IRQ.  Can
> anyone make any suggestions about where I could get started, here?
> Forgive my ignorance, but I thought one of the points of PCI was that
> you didn't have to worry (as much) about IRQs and such; that the devices
> were capable of sharing them, if necessary, and that the whole thing was
> for the most part self-configuring.  So, what's up?

--
-Duane Healing
-DNAware SoftLabs