eliot@engr.washington.edu (Eliot Lim) (06/13/91)
First of all, many thanks to everyone for their suggestions; including IBM. I still don't know what got screwed up but it doesn't matter. What I did was to open up the covers and move the ethernet card to another slot. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but if you move your ethernet card, the OS will assign it a new hardware address and leave the old one and treat it as a device that has gone offline. So with a "new" device I was able to configure it from scratch and it came right up! Eliot p.s. be sure to insulate yourself properly from static before trying this.
drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com (06/13/91)
In article <1991Jun12.230426.22643@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@engr.washington.edu (Eliot Lim) writes: >I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but if you move your ethernet >card, the OS will assign it a new hardware address and leave the old one >and treat it as a device that has gone offline. Feature. How else could it work? Consider a scenario ... Machine has two Ethernet adapters, one in slot 3 attached to network A, and one in slot 4 attached to network B. Lightning strikes and the adapter in slot 3 goes "poof". Now, when the machine comes up, I really want it to remember that the slot 4 Ethernet card is on network B, not go playing guessing games. Any method that didn't make the adapter definitions slot dependent would cause icky problems in such scenarios...you'd wind up with an adapter on network B, perhaps with a definition for network A ... total chaos. Similarly (and identically from the software's viewpoint), pulling out the slot 3 card shouldn't screw up the connection to network B. SO, the moral is that while all slots are created equally, the slot address of a card is just as important and unchangeable as the SCSI address of a drive. How do other systems handle this? Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center Internet: drake@ibm.com BITNET: DRAKE at ALMADEN Usenet: ...!uunet!ibmarc!drake Phone: (408) 927-1861
karish@mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) (06/14/91)
In article <843@rufus.UUCP> drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com writes: |In article <1991Jun12.230426.22643@milton.u.washington.edu> |eliot@engr.washington.edu (Eliot Lim) writes: ||I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but if you move your ethernet ||card, the OS will assign it a new hardware address and leave the old one ||and treat it as a device that has gone offline. | |Feature. How else could it work? Consider a scenario ... | |Now, when the machine comes up, I really want it to remember that the |slot 4 Ethernet card is on network B, not go playing guessing games. |Any method that didn't make the adapter definitions slot dependent |would cause icky problems in such scenarios... | |How do other systems handle this? Record the cards' Ethernet ID numbers, and query them at boot time? -- Chuck Karish karish@mindcraft.com Mindcraft, Inc. (415) 323-9000
drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com (06/14/91)
In article <676836895.5438@mindcraft.com> karish@mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes: > >Record the cards' Ethernet ID numbers, and query them at boot time? That's another obvious approach ... which leads to similar surprises as the slot-based method. With the Ethernet-ID approach you can indeed move the cards around from slot to slot, but you can't replace a broken card with a new card without reconfiguring the software. Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center Internet: drake@ibm.com BITNET: DRAKE at ALMADEN Usenet: ...!uunet!ibmarc!drake Phone: (408) 927-1861