pgg
12th July 2005, 02:07 AM
This system has been giving me problems lately. Installing Fedora Core 4 was a nightmare.
It's a dual processor (PIII 867) system with a Tyan S2567 (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderhe.html) motherboard.
It has onboard SCSI (LSI Symbios 53C1010 chipset), but the Fedora install would never get past the SCSI driver loading stage. So I disabled the onboard SCSI, put in an old Adaptec 2940AUW card ... install never got past the aic7xxx driver install. Fine, I put in an IDE drive and installed Fedora 4 on that.
Installed only after five or six attempts (complained about bad install media, but I know the CDs are good because I used them on three other systems), SMP kernel and all, but the onboard ethernet could -never- get an address by DHCP, and statically assigning one wouldn't work. Disabled the onboard ethernet, and threw in a 3Com NIC. No luck. Tried a Netgear 802.11b card. No luck. Reinstalled Fedora 4, and everything seemed to work with the 3Com NIC. Ran 'yum update' and had no trouble updating the system.
... except then I noticed it was running the uniprocessor kernel (2.6.11-1.1390_FC4). So I told Grub to use the SMP kernel (2.6.11-1.1390_FC4smp), rebooted, and now the network card can't get an address by DHCP (static won't work either). Switched back to the uniprocessor kernel, and the network card works OK.
This old machine is just a cluster node for dvd::rip, so the SCSI and onboard ethernet card problems were mere annoyances ... but being unable to use a SMP kernel is annoying and intolerable.
SMP kernel = NIC doesn't work
uni kernel = NIC works
Is there any explanation (other than a dying motherboard on its last legs) for this bizarre behavior?
It's a dual processor (PIII 867) system with a Tyan S2567 (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderhe.html) motherboard.
It has onboard SCSI (LSI Symbios 53C1010 chipset), but the Fedora install would never get past the SCSI driver loading stage. So I disabled the onboard SCSI, put in an old Adaptec 2940AUW card ... install never got past the aic7xxx driver install. Fine, I put in an IDE drive and installed Fedora 4 on that.
Installed only after five or six attempts (complained about bad install media, but I know the CDs are good because I used them on three other systems), SMP kernel and all, but the onboard ethernet could -never- get an address by DHCP, and statically assigning one wouldn't work. Disabled the onboard ethernet, and threw in a 3Com NIC. No luck. Tried a Netgear 802.11b card. No luck. Reinstalled Fedora 4, and everything seemed to work with the 3Com NIC. Ran 'yum update' and had no trouble updating the system.
... except then I noticed it was running the uniprocessor kernel (2.6.11-1.1390_FC4). So I told Grub to use the SMP kernel (2.6.11-1.1390_FC4smp), rebooted, and now the network card can't get an address by DHCP (static won't work either). Switched back to the uniprocessor kernel, and the network card works OK.
This old machine is just a cluster node for dvd::rip, so the SCSI and onboard ethernet card problems were mere annoyances ... but being unable to use a SMP kernel is annoying and intolerable.
SMP kernel = NIC doesn't work
uni kernel = NIC works
Is there any explanation (other than a dying motherboard on its last legs) for this bizarre behavior?
