Re: 3Com Etherlink 3c509b PnP

[Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net>]

It has certainly been reported that the 3c509B can work in PNP mode,
but the ease of doing so depends upon your hardware.

I'm rather concerned about your statement that you can't reconfigure
the card out of the PNP mode.  This is, um, bad.  The 3c5x9cfg.exe
program is seemingly very well behaved from DOS -- run it off a clean
boot floppy, if it is still crashing, I think you have problems of
non-trivial proportions.  Now, if you are having trouble SEEING the
card (this happens!) with the config program, there is a batch file on
the 3c509 config disk which turns off the PNP mode which seems to work
in these situations.

As for changing your network configuration, I'm not entirely sure what
you are asking, but it is pretty straight forward, consisting of these
files:
   /etc/myname          
   /etc/rc.conf
   /etc/mygate          
   /etc/hostname.*      
   /etc/resolv.conf    
   /etc/hosts           
   /etc/dhcpd.conf
   /etc/dhcpd.interfaces 
   /etc/inetd.conf      
   /etc/ipf.rules       
   /etc/ipnat.rules     
   /etc/sysctl.conf
  
(I try to use this checklist whenever reconfig'ing a system -- I
usually forget something with bad results if I don't!)

Nick.


Brian chance wrote:
> 
> Concerning hardware support for the 3c509b PnP etherlink card,
> 
> I have recently read in a past FAQ that the 3Com Etherlink III 3c509 / 509b
> should to be set out of Plug 'n Play mode for more efficiency in OpenBSD.
> The problem arised that i am unable to set my card out of PnP mode (my
> computer seems to crash when running the program for this task) . According
> to the list of supported hardware, the 3c509b PnP is actually supported, but
> i'm still having problems using it. Formerly, this card *did* infact work in
> FreeBSD while in PnP mode... Will it at all work in OpenBSD while in PnP
> mode or will i still have to switch it out of PnP mode somehow? Considering
> i know my default gateway, DNS server, IP , Netmask , Domain and host name
> is there any *easy* way of setting up the network configuration again (the
> ifconfig program looked pretty scary at first sight - all those ARP switches
> and stuff) =\
>      Thanks,
>           -Brian

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