Re: Computer weirdness, part Deux...
From: Kevin & Theresa Miller (atftb_at_alaska.net)
Date: 02/19/04
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Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:21:44 GMT
Kevin & Theresa Miller wrote:
OK, here's the next installment in the continuing saga (see Computer Weirdness,
Part 1) of trying to whip my new computer into shape. Last we left off, I was
bemoaning the sporadic nature of DVD/CD drive access. I've since discovered
that if I power the mobo switch off for a few seconds, then turn it back on, the
computer will recognize the drive. It doesn't seem to matter if, when turning
the machine off for the night, I turn the mobo off or leave it on; the next day
I have to power cycle it for the DVD/CD to be readable. A minor pain, but a lot
easier than swapping from IDE0 to IDE1 and back.
Still don't know if it's the mobo, the drive or the bios. ABIT has a new bios
out for the ABIT NF7-S: version 21. I'm on 19. Tempted to upgrade, but Monarch
Computing web site says they load the latest tested for compatibility. Since I
still haven't heard from their tech support after two emails and a phone call
I'm hesitant to mess w/the bios until they can tell me if there are any issues
they're aware of.
So anyway, I can coax the drive into being readable which is a plus even if it
requires a reboot now and then. I'd also previously mentioned that the drive
(SATA) light didn't come on during access. It appears that's not entirely true
- it only doesn't come on during a read. I copied a CD (legally owned!) tonight
and it would flash red during writes. During playback I never saw it flicker.
Go figure.
Initially, I had trouble getting the onboard ethernet to work. Queuing off a
post here by someone else a few weeks ago, I downloaded the NVIDIA nForce2
driver: http://www.nvidia.com/object/sysutility_1.0. This is the Northbridge
drivers not video drivers. YaST downloaded the NVIDIA video drivers during the
first online update so I was spared that chore although I've done it several
times and pretty much have it down! The NVIDIA site had an RPM that said it
would work w/SuSE. It didn't. I downloaded the tarball and compiled/installed
that way and it worked fine. Ethernet came right up. I gave it an address
something along the lines of 192.168.5.8/24 or something like that and gave the
Windows 98 box an address too, and wired 'em up with a crossover cable. Presto,
I could see each. I shared the drive on the W98 side and was able to copy w/o
any trouble. No real issues there which was nice.
I plugged in the my Netgear MR314 4 port wireless router, and went in to
configure it. This is where I made my first mistake. I went ahead and set a
WEP key, essid, DHCP scope, change the channel, etc. Dumb. Gotta keep things
simple, get 'em working, then tighten the straps. Works better that way.
A few days later I got a Netgear MA311 card from Amazon. Got my notice today
that my $10 rebate is due to ship in eight weeks. Good thing. I've got bills
to pay! ;-) Anyway, I slapped the critter in, and it complained during boot
that it wanted me to load the pcmcia drivers. This is a PCI card but it looks
like a pcmcia card soldered onto a regular PCI card so I went ahead and loaded
it. I tried to configure it in YaST. It found the card, but it wouldn't come
up. Bummer. Had some module name in the config in YaST, but I didn't know if
that was the right one and it wasn't working so I didn't know what to tell it.
I poked around on the web, and figured out that it probably has a prism chip
set, so I try the prism driver. No go. OK, how about the Orinoco driver. Web
says that'll work too. Nope.
I blow off YaST, and go into /etc/sysconfig/network and start poking around.
Gotta love nice little 7 or 8 line text files. All you need to know right
there. I back off all the nonsense in the router, put it on channel 1, take out
the wep keys, etc. Of course, all this is taking a couple hours of trying this,
and trying that, to no avail. Finally I notice that the link light is on, on
the router. Ah ha - I am communicating. Just not very successfully. I plug in
the cable and web into the config utility on the critter and check the stats.
Yup, packets both send and received. That means the driver is probably ok.
It's set to the orinoco driver so I just leave that alone. Don't know if the
prism or the other one that I can't remember the name of would work any better
but just working is good enough for me at this point. So it has to be something
else.
I recalled from another post here, that someone had to turn off eth0 to get
their wlan card to talk. OK, I can try that. I enter 'ifdown eth0'. Command
line returns w/o errors, but ifconfig shows it's still up. I mess around trying
to bring the wlan0 up and eth0 down with the ifup and ifdown scripts and never
get anywhere for a good long time. Finally I try 'ifconfig eth0 down'. Presto,
that worked. Great. I spent two hours fighting the stupid thing because I'm
using ifup/ifdown instead of ifconfig up/down just to save a few keystroked.
What a lark.
Anyway, now that eth0 was actually down I tried pinging the hub and other
computer. It worked! In the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0 file I set
STARTMODE=manual so it wouldn't come up at boot, but is easily available if I
need it. I added the wep keys, essid, etc. back in the config files and on the
router, left dhcp off (with two computers why bother), and called it a night.
My theory is that it was probably working just fine from early on, but because
eth0 was the first device listed that packets went out it by default. The
wireless would get a packet in from the router, but try to reply via eth0. I
suspect that if I had given it an address on a different subnet the wireless
might have worked w/o downing it, but I never tried it.
All in all the card is pretty easy to configure once you know what's going. I'd
have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd kept it simple from the beginning, and
built on things one step at a time instead of trying to do everything at once
then wondering which piece I'd boogered. No matter - I'm a bit wiser for it in
the long run...
...Kevin
-- Kevin & Theresa Miller Juneau, Alaska http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
- Next message: SK0815: "Re: SuSE 9.0 on a Dell notebook?"
- Previous message: David Haggett: "Re: media library for xmms"
- In reply to: Kevin & Theresa Miller: "Re: Computer weirdness, part 1..."
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