hello,

i have 3com etherlink iii 509b isa card that refuses to let me change
its port or irq. also the only way i can get the card to talk on the
network is to put my usb mouse on the same irq and wiggle it around
really fast when i'm trying to receive or transmit. initially i could
change neither the irq of the usb mouse nor of the ethernet card. i
have turned off pnp in my bios and i can now move the irq of the usb
mouse. however, without the wiggling mouse sharing its irq, the
ethernet card with not work.

from what i can tell by gleaning the 9fans archives, the 3c509b is
quite a troublesome card. i found rumors of a dos utility that would
convince the card to change its port and irq. i think this leaves me
with two questions. first, where do i find this fabled configuration
program? googling has proved fruitless. second, is fiddling with the
port or irq even going to fix the problem? as far as i understand, if
the card has its own irq staked out, it should just go on its way

here is what is printed on startup:
#l0; elnk3: 10Mbps port 0x300 irq 10:
#U/usb0: uhci: port 0xEF80 irq 12

maybe this is an isa-specific problem that i refuse to remember, but
i think the answer is that rather than changing the irq (i believe this
is determed by hard-wiring for the isa bus --- if memory serves), you
inform the kernel what the irq is. plan9.ini(8) has more information
but i think you wish

ether0=type=3C509 irq=12

in your plan9.ini.

- erik

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 7:40 PM, michael block gmail.com> wrote:

I remember this card. The port number and irq was setup by small DOS
program provided by 3COM in drivers/utilities package. Did you find
drivers for this card on 3COM site?

Antonin

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:40:29PM -0500, michael block wrote:

Frail memory triumphs over the almighty Google at last!

3C5X9CFG.EXE can be found in this self-extracting archive:

ftp://ftp.3com.com/pub/nic/3c509/3c509x2.exe

I think it needs 3C5X9ENG.HLP from the same archive as well.

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 1:06 PM, erik quanstrom coraid.com> wrote:

yes, i tried setting it in plan9.ini, but the card just ignores it

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 2:20 PM, sigint.cs.purdue.edu> wrote:

Where can you even buy an ISA Ethernet (or any) card these days? I don't
even see them on Ebay or Craiglist these days. As far as ISA Ethernet
cards go, in my experience the '509 was one of the most reliable ones ever
made. In the early 1990s I deployed several hundred of these in various
university workstation labs running Windows 3.11 and BSD/OS, and they just
plain worked.

Referring to an earlier message in this thread, the string 'irq=nn' on
the ether0= line in the .ini file just tells the kernel what IRQ to speak
to the card on. It doesn't actually re-configure the card to use that IRQ.
(The original message was a bit ambiguous about this.)

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

there's no reason it needs to be isa, i have pci slots too. it's just
the only card i have that qualifies as plan 9 supported hardware

i wouldn't say it's a bad card, just that from what i read in the
9fans archives it seems to be troublesome on plan 9 for some reason.
i've used the same card on openbsd with no problem

ok ;-) i ass-u-med that you were stuck with a real antique out of no
choice.

This being the case, buy an Intel Pro/100[0] PCI card. Accept no
substitutes. They run everywhere, and your time is worth much more than
the $10 difference in price vs. fighting an el-cheapo NIC.

--lyndon

heh. geez am i dopey. the problem was my misunderstanding of what the
irq=xx parts in plan9.ini do. bios decides the irq, plan9.ini tells
the kernel what the bios decided. that's my isa card mantra from now
on

thanks everyone,
-- m