Netgear FA310TX REV-D2

Clemmitt Sigler siglercm@alphamb2.phys.vt.edu
Thu May 20 10:17:22 1999


Hi,

I'm afraid "they"'ve done it to me.  I just bought a couple of Bay
Networks Netgear FA310TX Ethernet cards because they were Tulip
chip 10/100 cards and were priced right :^)  Now I'm paying for
it.

These cards are FA310TX REV-D2 and don't have a true DEC controller
chip on them.  When I load the driver or run tulip-diag, it reports
back as a Lite-On 82C168 PNIC and uses an MII transceiver.  But
the card simply doesn't work.  I tried all the `options=' setting
that should make the card work with the MII using 10-base-T, but
no soap.

Two points:

1.) The chip on it is marked "NETGEAR\nLC82C169C\n9903A\nECP22" --
this naturally makes me think it's not an 82C168 but some new controller
chip, maybe from Lite-On, maybe a Lite-On knock-off (a knock-off
of a knock-off :^);

2.) The card is *trying* to work.  After the tulip driver is loaded
during boot, the link light on my hub doesn't come on but the light
on the back of the card is on.  Then when the boot scripts try to
access my local net, the link light on my hub will occasionally
flash, but that's all.

Needless to say, pinging out or in doesn't work at all.  I'm decidedly
*not* a kernel driver hacker, but I can putz around with some C code.
I just don't know where to start on this thing because I'm not familiar
with the guts of the Tulip driver.

Could somebody give me some pointers where to start with this?  I'm happy
to work on it if I know where to start.  Would the output of tulip-diag
help?  Finally, if somebody out there would like to work on this
card, I'd gladly send you one.  Just let me know.  Thanks for all your
help, I love the Tulip-based cards (well, the ones I've used so far :^).

					Clemmitt Sigler