Novell NE2000, NE2000plus Ethernet, and Compatibles

If you have an NE2000 or NE2000plus adapter in your machine, selectively scan for it first before scanning for other legacy devices.

Configure NE2000 or NE2000plus adapters for I/O mode if they are in a machine with devices supported by the Solaris smc driver.

Preconfiguration Information

• The Solaris nei driver expects the NE2000 or NE2000plus card to be in a 16-bit ISA slot and jumpered for 16-bit operations.

• Some NE2000 and NE2000plus compatibles allow you to configure the bus speed; the bus speed on the card should match that of the system.

• The NE2000 card is configured with dip switches before installing the card. The NE2000plus is configured with the manufacturer's PLUSDIAG utility.

Supported Settings

Note that some NE2000 compatibles may further restrict these choices.

NE2000:

NE2000plus:

Known Problems and Limitations

• If data corruption errors occur while an NE2000 or NE2000plus card is installed, check the bus speed that is set on the card. (This is a configurable option on some compatible cards.) Some cards may not run reliably at 16 MHz and must be configured to run at 8 MHz.

• Some NE2000 and NE2000plus compatibles may misidentify slot width or may not work with all mode or jumper settings. For example, some NE2000plus compatibles may only work in both data modes (I/O and shared memory), depending on the system configuration. Try a different bus slot if the card misdetects a 16-bit slot for an 8-bit slot. For NE2000plus compatibles, try both data modes by setting the jumpers or using the DOS configuration program.

• If the NE2000 card is not recognized by the Solaris operating environment, it's possible the compatible does not sufficiently resemble the NE2000 hardware. Improper configuration setup may also cause this failure.

• If the system hangs or the NE2000 card is not recognized by the Solaris software, it may be necessary to reset the bus speed or I/O recovery time (which may be settable in the system BIOS). General bus noise may also affect the behavior of certain NE2000 compatibles; try swapping devices into different slots until the card functions satisfactorily.

• If the system hangs after booting with an NE2000 or NE2000plus card installed but it doesn't hang if you remove the card, check that:

  • The NE2000 or NE2000plus card has been jumpered for 16-bit operation and has been placed in a 16-bit slot. Some cards misdetect slot type.

  • The NE2000 or NE2000plus compatible is recognized. If it isn't, replace the card.

• For NE2000 compatibles that do not operate at all combinations of I/O address and IRQ settings, use the default values of IRQ 3 and I/O address 0x300.

• NE2000plus cards only: If the card has been configured to run in Shared Memory mode, it will use 0x4000 bytes of shared memory in the range 0xD0000-0xDFFFF. Check that the BIOS setup allocates this range of memory to the adapter and that other cards in the system do not conflict. If a conflict is unavoidable, configure the NE2000plus in I/O mode so that it will not use shared memory. (To configure the NE2000plus card, the vendor-supplied DOS program PLUSDIAG must be used.)