Re: Can't get MAC addr of an ed(4) adapter

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 03:19:57PM +0200, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> a friend of mine just upgraded his box from 5.4 to CURRENT.  His
> ed(4) network adapter used to work when running 5.4 as well as
> Windows.  Now, the card is recognized (as ed1, not ed0, I still
> wonder why since I can't see any resource conflict related message)
> but it doesn't have a MAC address.  Note that the interface flags
> are somewhat weird.  My friend tried to use an in-kernel driver as
> well as the if_ed module, this is the same.  Defining ED_DEBUG
> doesn't give more diagnostic about the problem.  We can still
> assign a MAC address manually, although ATM I still haven't got any
> chance to try if the card is really working, but I'll be able to
> in a few hours.

These cards are real mongrels. I had one about 7 years ago. Horrible.
Highly recommend getting rid of it. PCI Realtek 10Mbps, yes? Know them,
hate them.

I would try removing any device hints from the /boot/device.hints file
which begin with 'hint.ed.0' as they are probably misleading, if the
actual card is probed as ed1 (although I don't see this in the dmesg
output here).

Clearly something is going wrong when the driver attempts to read the
station address from the onboard PROM. Perhaps something is wrong
with it? It's difficult to tell because the cards are mongrels (NE2000
clones abound, and the driver tries to be all things to all people).

The PCI attachment code certainly doesn't try to read the station address
from Vital Product Data or anything like that, it just calls the generic
Novell probe routine.

Try recompiling with 'makeoptions ED_DEBUG' in the kernel config file
and see what it turns up.

Also try the DOS utilities which Realtek used to ship for the 8029 as
these can be used to reprogram/verify the Station Address PROM contents.

Regards,
BMS