tx/rx woes

[Allen B. Cummings]

>   I was running Slackware 3.4 with kernel version 2.0.33. I've got a
> vortex card (3c590) and had all of the usual networking stuff configured
> and everything was running correctly. (consequently, I've had this card 
> working since I first installed Slackware 3.0, upgrading pretty much as 
> soon as new kernels or versions of Slackware came out -- never had a 
> problem)
> 
>   Last weekend, I got my Linux Developer's Resource subscription and decided
> to upgrade to Slackware 3.5. (kernel version 2.0.34) When I set up all the 
> networking stuff and loaded the 3c59x module, everything seemed to be
> working properly but the card wasn't transmitting or receiving.
> 

  This problem turned out to be rather more odd than I'd first expected, and
every suggestion I was given turned up the same results -- nothing. Annoyed,
I decided to go back to my previous installation and encountered the same
problem. (consequently, it didn't work in Win95 either) I then tried this out 
with another Vortex card, a Boomerang, and a D-Link NE2000 compatible ISA 
card. None of them worked. Even more annoyed, I flashed in an update to my 
bios and reset it, and also played with the 3-Com utilities for each card. 
Still, it didn't work.  Increasingly annoyed, I disassembled my computer 
into its component parts...  I didn't expect this to solve anything, but it 
made me feel better. :)

At any rate, I played around both with "hardware solutions" and "software
solutions", but in the end nothing worked until I shoved two Vortex cards
in. Finally, I was transmitting and receiving. What's even neater is that
when I went back to just one card, everything still worked.

Allen