[vortex] 3com905CX and Telocity ADSL gateway

[Akop Pogosian]

Hello everyone,

The 3com905CX PCI card that came with my new PC completely refuses to
talk to my ADSL gateway. However, it works fine when I connect my it
to my old PC using a crossover cable. The PC on the other end uses a
3com900B card. My new PC came with a vanilla RedHat Linux 7.0 setup,
using kernel 2.2.17. Hoping that I'll have a better luck with the
newer kernels, I decided to install RedHat 7.1 using the bootnet.img.
However, the system fails to configure networking using DHCP (the
gateway runs a DHCP server). When I set the IP address by hand, I
still can't ping the gateway. This system also came with the
alternative 3c90x driver.  I didn't have any luck using that one
either. The only difference with using 3c90x was that about one out of
four times, my system does manage to get a DHCP response from the
gateway and even set the IP address and a default route but after that
I still can't ping any sites or the gateway. Moreover, the system once
completely locked when I was running RedHat's dhcp client and tcpdump
simultaneously.  The gateway is known to work fine because my other PC
connects to it all the time. It has a telocity label on it, but the
board inside of apparently was made by Alcatel.

Any tips on what could be wrong? I downloaded the Linux diagnostics
utilities but I don't really know what I should be looking for. I am
planning on buying a Netgear Cable/DSL home router anyways so that my
PCs will not be connecting directly to the ADSL gateway. However, it
still would be nice to know why my current setup doesn't work.

-akop