[vortex] HELP needed: Cross-over connection to Router not working with 3c509C (Tornado)

[Cristian Alonso]

First of all, Bogdan, thanks for your quick
response/help.

The card is a 905CX-TX-NM (that's what the sticker on
it says). The driver identifies it as:

3c59x: Donald Becker and others.
www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html
00:0e.0: 3Com PCI 3c905C Tornado at 0xf480. Vers
LK1.1.16

> What does /proc/net/dev show ? Does the number of
> interrupts associated 
> with the device increase in /proc/interrupts ?
I ping the router using ping -c 1 <ipadd>
and i see the following:

/proc/net/dev increments transmission stats in 3
frames and 180 bytes (that sounds OK, 3*60 bytes
packets)


Interrupts increment in 3 (that sounds OK, 3 frames
sent).
I see no received packets count/bytes or interrupts.
It seems no receiving interrupts are generated in the
NIC (???).


> 
> > until I asked 3COM support and they told me to
> change the PHYCOMPAT
> > field in ther Windows driver and voila!, the
> cross-over connection
> > started to work fine.
> 
> I have just checked on a Windows 2000 computer and
> indeed this setting was 
> there - it was enabled and I'm sure that I haven't
> touched it before, so 
> this might be the default. After disabling it, I was
> still able to use the
> computer. A search in the documentation and 3Com
> site returned nothing, a 
> search on the Internet only returned some .INF files
> that contained it as 
> an entry. So, I have no idea what it is about.
> If 3Com support can indicate to you what this option
> does (maybe even what 
> registers on the card are modified, although I doubt
> this), it might 
> provide us with some clue about a Linux equivalent.
> 

Tha sounds like a good idea. I am going to ask 3COM
about this. 

I already tried searching for PHYCOMPAT on Internet
but found nothing. I have also taken a look at the
Technical Reference documentation of the card and
could not found any register in the board that has
something to do with PHYCOMPAT (I guess you guys
already knew that!). Anyway, I will keep you up to
date with what 3COM answers to my question about that.


> Could you check if this card is really a 905C or a
> 905CX (Windows driver 
> might report it with the correct name, best is to
> open the computer and 
> look at what's written on the card) ?
> 
> Do you have any other computer preferrably with a
> different NIC ? You 
> could then check if connecting this computer to the
> router with the same 
> crossover cable works and even if connecting the 2
> computers with this 
> crossover cable works and you need or not to
> activate this option in the
> Windows driver. I ask this because I suspect the
> cable to not be 
> good; I routinely connect with crossover cables
> computers with 3Com cards 
> and I never had any problems.
> 

I have tested the connection with the same cable and a
different NIC (ne2000, not 3COM) and everything works
OK. I ping back and forth without trouble. It does not
seem to be a cable problem. 
Anyway, I have changed the cable and it seems that the
longer the cable is, the better the connection works.
That is, with a 2 meter (6 feet aprox. ) cable it does
not work at all. With a 4 meter cable some packets are
received (???). I do not have a longer cable to test,
but I will do that a.s.a.p.


Thanks for your help again. Regards,
Cristian Alonso Aldama

> -- 
> Bogdan Costescu
> 
> IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer
> Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
> Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120
> Heidelberg, GERMANY
> Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54
> 8868
> E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De
>  

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