How do I get Solaris to recognize a NE2000 compatible NIC card?
NEI is the driver name for the Novell/Eagle 2000-compatible family of NIC cards. The driver is disabled by default because probing for it causes problems with other cards (it sometimes locks the system up). If this card is “Plug and Play,” you should first disable it and configure the card manually, if possible. Don’t use DCA probing for ne2000: it may disrupt recognition of or access to other devices (in my case, it was keyboard :-). So, you have to modify file /kernel/drv/nei.conf to include I/O ranges, interrupts (1 line per card).
NEI is the driver name for the Novell/Eagle 2000-compatible family of NIC cards. The driver is disabled by default because probing for it causes problems with other cards (it sometimes locks the system up). If this card is “Plug and Play,” you should first disable it and configure the card manually, if possible. Don’t use DCA probing for ne2000: it may disrupt recognition of or access to other devices (in my case, it was keyboard :-). So, you have to modify file /kernel/drv/nei.conf to include I/O ranges, interrupts (1 line per card). For example: name=”nei” parent=”isa” reg=1,0xf600,0x1f interrupts=11; Where name, “nei,” is what will show up in /dev. The parent, “isa,” is what bus type to use. The term ISA is misleading as it includes PCI bus (To Solaris, it’s either “sysbus,” the SPARC system bus, or “isa,” meaning not SPARC sysbus). The “1” is a flag meaning that I’m going to specify I/O port ranges, rather than memory offsets, 0xf600 indicates the beginning I/O address, in hex, and
NEI is the driver name for the Novell/Eagle 2000-compatible family of NIC cards. The driver is disabled by default because probing for it causes problems with other cards (it sometimes locks the system up). So, you have to modify file /kernel/drv/nei.conf to include I/O ranges, interrupts. For example: name=”nei” parent=”isa” reg=0x1,0xf600,0x1f interrupts=11 ; Where name, “nei,” is what will show up in /dev. The parent, “isa, ” is what bus type to use. The term ISA is misleading as it includes PCI bus. To Solaris, it’s either sysbus, the SPARC system bus, or isa, meaning anything that’s not SPARC sysbus. The “0x1” is a flag meaning that I’m going to specify I/O port ranges, rather than memory offsets, 0xf600 indicates the beginning I/O address, in hex and 0x1f is the offset of I/O range, from the beginning, in hex. The “interrupts=11” indicate IRQ 11, in decimal. Thus, I have a Realtek 8029 PCI NE2000-compatible card, set to base I/O addresses 0xf600-0xf61f, IRQ 11. You also have to a
