Second network card
A while back I installed a second Ethernet card in my Linux box and could not get it to work before the iBook returned to where it belonged. Having had another notebook computer visiting us last night, I finally got the thing up and running.
All in all it was a simple matter of:
- Wasting time examining the floppy supplied with the card for evidence of a program for setting the card’s IRQ.
-
Downloading
rtl8139-diag.cand running it. It informs me in no uncertain terms that I need to visit the BIOS settings. The error message has the important hint that there is no way to do this other than the BIOS set-up panel itslef. - Shutting down the operating system so I could do this little thing. Fiddling with the BIOS always makes me nervous, but after a couple of attempts I managed to get it working. I knew this when I rebooted Linux and it detected and activated the second network interface automatically.
- Changed the network settings for the borrowed laptop. Poked it some more until it believed that the network was there and it was possible to ping back and forth along the wire.
-
Changed Internet Explorer’s own special control panel
for the automatic dial-up. One of the options makes it so
that it does not dial up if there already is a working
network. Duh. Now MSIE can visit
http://10.0.0.1/but cannot resolve domain names. -
Changed my
dnscachesettings to permit my newly created192.168.100.0/24network to use it. (A simple matter oftouch /services/dnscache/root/ip/192.168.100, as it turns out.)
At this point it was possible to browse the WWW from the laptop. Yay.