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To: questions@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org
From: eaparis@mke.ab.com (Eloy A. Paris)
Subject: Problems with zp0 driver in 041295 SNAP?
Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org
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Hi.

Since I knew about FreeBSD around one month ago I challenged myself to put
it to run in my company's LAN using Ethernet. Since then, I have been facing
all kinds of new challenges.

I have a Notebook computer (a NEC Versa V/50, with 20 MBytes of RAM and
enough hard disk space for the basic stuff). Because of this the first thing
I did was to change my Xircom PCMCIA Ethernet card for one of the supported
cards (a 3Com Etherlink III 3C589 card.) At the very beginning I did not
know that Xircom's cards are not supported because Xircom does not give
technical information about them (stupid, isn't it?) so I struggled a little
with it.

Then, when I realized that and got my 3Com card, I said to my self: "Now you
are in bussiness Eloy, at last you'll be able to surf the Net using your
FreeBSD box." Guess what: I was wrong!!!

I have been fighting with the zp0 driver for about 4 days and finally I
decided to give up until somebody say something about this.

What's the problem? Well, the zp0 driver sees the card but then when it
reads the card information to make sure it has what it is supposed to have
(after the driver has written the I/O base address and the IRQ), there is
nothing there.

I compiled the if_zp.c file with the symbol ZP_DEBUG defined but I could not
tell what is going on since I do not have any technical infomation about the
card nor the PCMCIA controller.

But this is not all: the weird part is that after each time I reboot my
computer with FreBSD the Card Information Structure (CIS) of my card gets
corrupted.

After this corruption I can not get into the 3Com's configuration program
(for DOS) for this card (3C589CFG.EXE) because the program aborts with the
message "Corrupted CIS. Please replace card with a good one and try again."
Thanks God I found in 3Com's BBS a program to clean the CIS because if not I
would not even be able to use Ethernet under DOS (that I am doing pretty fine.)

I tryed everething. I compiled the whole kernel changing the I/O base
address and the IRQ and nothing. I configured the card under DOS and then
Ctrl-Alt-Del and nothing.

Something very weird is going on here. I do not know if it is the
combination of my NEC Versa with the zp0 driver or what. I would like to know.

If somebody is interested, I can mail to the list(s) the debug information
the zp0 driver is sending to the screen.

Also, if somebody gives to me technical information about the 3Com card and
the PCMCIA controller I could try to find by myself what is going on.

Any help or pointers will be appreciated as well as your experience with
this card under FreeBSD.

See ya.

Eloy.-

--

Eloy A. Paris
Allen-Bradley de Venezuela

"Los poderosos nos parecen grandes solo porque estamos de rodillas,
levantemonos!!!"

Carlos Marx