Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!bighorn.accessnv.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!news.ucdavis.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!netcom20!iec From: iec@netcom20.netcom.com (Interstate Electronics Corp) Subject: TCP/IP with an SMC Ultra 16 ethernet. Usable? Message-ID: <IEC.95Jun11005547@netcom20.netcom.com> X-Attribution: mre Sender: iec@netcom20.netcom.com Reply-To: mre@lpf.org (Mike Elliott) Organization: NETCOM On-line services Date: Sun, 11 Jun 1995 07:55:45 GMT Lines: 52 After a comparatively recent pep-talk from Kirk McCusick, I decided to take a fully-functional Linux system (i486, 8Mb) which was part of a network of Sparcs and Indigos and replace the OS with NetBSD. No, I'm not crazy, I just thought that as the Linux was getting a bit crufty (version 1.08 or thereabouts) I could do with an upgrade, and I might as well see what the other folks were using. How else does one learn? So I went out and bought InfoMagic's BSDisc containing both NetBSD (1.0) and FreeBSD (2.0), and proceeded to install NetBSD. The results were thoroughly disappointing. One of the advantages I had heard that Net/Free BSD has over Linux is the quality of TCP/IP and the device drivers available. I have no empirical evidence to support this supposition -- on the contrary, I had truly miserable luck with my particular installation, enough so that I will have to dump it entirely unless someone can give me a straw to grasp. Basically, NFS was completely unusable. I had originally intended to simply install off the CDROM over NFS, but the installation quickly fills up some kernel buffer then terminates. Next, I used FTP to manually gather the base installation system into /usr/tmp (from the CDROM mounted on an Indigo) and found to my astonishment that some of the tar files had been corrupted during transfer! I didn't think that was possible with FTP! After a while I gave up and switched to trying FreeBSD. The installation procedure for FreeBSD was certainly much clearer, but still not quite up to what Linux Slackware, for example, provides. However, I recognize that I will only install a system a few times, while I'll use it every day, so I was willing to soldier on. The killer, however, was that I had the same inability to use NFS or FTP that I had discovered under NetBSD. I followed the directions on how to manually intervene in the ethernet configuration process (insuring that we use the right IRQ and ram address) but was unable to convince the kernel that my ethernet was not on IRQ 9. This is the exact same card, in the exact same machine, in the exact same network that worked without a problem with Linux. So, my question to the cognoscenti is: Can I do something to make networking functional for Net/Free BSD, or Should I just go back to Linux (but maybe a newer version)? -- -- ======================================================================== Mike Elliott mre@emerald.ccss.com mre@lpf.org ========================================================================