Network issues on a ServerWorks chipset mobo

quiver

and yes, I've waded through the forums already!!!

Ok, got an odd situation here. I'm installing Gentoo on a dual-PIII Tyan Thunder HEsl S2567 (ServerWorks ServerSet HE-SL chipset), with a gigabyte of parity ECC installed. The motherboard 'features' onboard LAN, with an embedded Intel 82559 rev. 08 controller.

Two additional PCI NIC's (Intel Pro/100+, RealTek RTL8139C) and no less than four Gentoo livecd's (2004.2, 2004.3, 2005.0, 2005.1) later, and not one of the livecd's could recognise any of the adapters, no matter what was thrown at it by way of dhcpcd or static IP's, or driver loading for that matter (coincidentally it couldn't load the onboard SCSI, a PCI Adaptec 29160, or the onboard audio either...)

Oh, wait up, let me expand on the above ..."recognise any of the adapters"... Well, ifconfig -a will show the device, and dmesg | grep eth reports no more nor any less than it should;

adaptr · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 12:14 pm Post subject:

quiver · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 12:42 pm Post subject:

Well, from a 2005.1 livecd at least, you'd be right, but wrong. Yes it uses the autoloader if I add the noapic tag to it, but still exactly the same problem exists, so Knoppix is still doing something different.

Is there someplace I can find a key for all the modules lsmod gave me earlier? Because if I had descriptions of those modules, it'd probably be a lot easier to track down... I could go through what the differences were between the 2005.1 gentoo noapic & the knoppix livecd, but it would hardly narrow it down, there's scarcely a similarity to be found, which is interesting.

adaptr · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 1:41 pm Post subject:

Let's start with the NIC, just to simplify matters.
What happens when you modprobe it, or force load it, or try to change the IRQ assignment ?

Is there a difference between Knoppix's lspci output and the Gentoo one ?

What do the various /proc lists tell you in either of these OSes ?

I'm afraid you have to investigate this stuff, since short of reading the Knoppix sources I doubt it'll be an easy answer.
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root_cause · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2005 Posts: 8

Quiver

No, you are not alone. I have had the same issue with my own Serverworks STL2 motherboard - right up to this weekend - and yes - with the same built in Intel network card. In fact If I read your message right your experience almost parallels mine. I boot from the 2005.1 Live CD, the card is detected AND provided an IP address via DHCP, but within minutes would just drop off the network and off the active list in ifconfig.

The best I could gather is this - the issue is either specific to the Gentoo boot CD OR the linux kernel used OR a combination of the two with the Serverworks system hardware. I say this because as a control experiment I can boot and install FreeBSD 5,6 and 7 versions with no problem anywhere during the process. Gentoo itself also runs without a hitch once the install is complete.

So to solve the problem for install I manually assigned an IP address to the Intel card as soon as the Live CD booted.
However to your credit it sounds like you tried this long ago. In your situation my next step would be to install a secondary network card to use during setup since once Gentoo is installed the Intel card seems to work just fine. Sorry I can't give you a better answer.

As a matter of interest I remember reading a similar note during FreeBSD's development of their 5.x series. Since the 5.x series is a complete rewrite from 4.x one of their first tasks was to rewrite the kernel down to the system drivers. And one of the biggest headaches I read about was the driver for this network card. Sometimes the card's active light would stay off even when the connection was active. Other times the card itself would not connect at all. They even asked Intel what the cause may be and Intel was stumped.

I think I read this on the FreeBSD mailing list as well as one of the early release notes.

Anyway, it took a while but as always with open source development teams they solved it. I never could locate what it was or what they did.

So if not to solve your problem here I can at least validate your experience. Hope this helps.

root_cause · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2005 Posts: 8

Sorry, I just read your message one more time. You already tried multiple cards with no success. Damn - even I had better luck than that....

tkdfighter · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 2:05 pm Post subject:

Sorry to bump up this thread again, but I'm having the very same problem. Did anyone ever solve this?

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 2:26 pm Post subject:

Just to make sure... is this problem still present with Gentoo 2006.1?
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tkdfighter · Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 12:18 pm Post subject:

I'm still using 2006.0 and the kernel 2.6.14-hardened-r8 on this installation as of now. Should the issue be solved using 2006.1? Well, looks like I'll have to download the full CD and then update. Could anyone tell me what version of Knoppix the original poster used? I tried version 4.0.2, the RHEL 4 installation / rescue CD, the Gentoo 2004.1 minimal LiveCD and the FreeBSD 5.3 disc. None of them worked.
I also installed a Linksys PCI NIC, which uses the Tulip driver. But that was also a no-go with all of the above mentioned LiveCDs.

I'll try using a newer kernel and update to 2006.1.

tkdfighter · Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2006 11:00 pm Post subject:

So here's a quick report: I tried out the 2006.1 LiveCD and on my first boot, the Linksys card was working just fine! I had disabled the integrated NIC in the BIOS. I then rebooted and enabled it, and then they both didn't work. Ever since, I've been trying to find out how I got it to work the first time. I've disabled the Intel NIC again, tried plugging the card into a PCI slot on the second bus, playing around with modules and parameters. But nothing works :cry:

I really have no clue what to do except sleep over it, which I'll do now.

tkdfighter · Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:06 pm Post subject:

OK, I solved the problem. My network cable is pretty long, and apparantly not all NICs like that. So I tried moving the computer to a different room with a shorter cable and cha-ching, both ethernet cards worked just fine.

Sorry to have bumped up this thread as my problem was not quite on topic, but the symptoms seemed the same.