Preconfiguration Information

Supported Settings

• Use the manufacturer's configuration utility to configure SMC EtherCard Elite16 Ultra (8216) and SMC EtherEZ (8416) network adapters:

  o Shared Memory Address:

  0xC0000-0xEE000

• The information in the following table is only used for EtherCard PLUS (WD/SMC 8003 and 8013EBT) cards that use jumpers to set the configuration.

Known Problems and Limitations

• The boards will only work in memory-mapped mode; use the manufacturer's utility to configure the device. Ideally, the board should be in Plug and Play mode.

• The EtherCard PLUS (8003) board has a limited amount of on-board memory, which causes poor NFS system performance. To avoid this problem, NFS system mounts over the 8003 interface must use a 4-Kbyte read/write buffer size.

• There is a problem with the design of the ISA bus when using cards that use shared RAM addresses: you cannot successfully put an 8-bit card in the same 128K address range with a 16-bit card. There are three 128K ranges into which cards can be placed: A0000-BFFFF, C0000-DFFFF, and E0000-FFFFF. 8-bit and 16-bit devices cannot coexist in any of these ranges, though they can exist in different ranges on the same system.

  SMC 8003 cards are 8-bit cards. The SMC 8013, 8216 and 8416 cards are 16-bit cards. If your system contains any 8-bit cards (such as the SMC 8003) that use shared memory, be sure they are configured into a 128K address range that does not contain any 16-bit cards.

• Some versions of SMC's EZSTART utility can restrict the system media types to 10BASE-T or AUI connection even if BNC connection is actually being used. Disable Automatic Media Detection, and select the Custom and Setup options to set the Network Interface to BNC or another connector type.