Subject: Re: ethernet card

From: "Tom Watson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 May 2000 11:18:09 -0800

On Sun, 7 May 2000 00:29:38 -0400 (EDT), [email-masked] wrote:
> In order for my server to appear in the chooser of macs on the network I 
> have to type ifconfig eth0 promisc.
> 
> I know this probably isn't the best solution, but its all that will work
> with my current nic.
> 
> The problem is that I have to do this every time i reboot the server. I
> tried adding that line to rc.local so it would run the command at startup,
> but this hasn't worked.
> 
> Any suggestions?

What is the type of interface card.  I just recently went thru the
process of getting a "new" interface card operational.  One of the
problems it had was that it didn't recieve group addresses correctly.
Yours might be the same way.  EtherTalk uses a specific multicast address
for getting information, and this might be the "problem".  Some
network drivers aren't so accomidating.  

It turns out that implementing the multicast filter is not the easiest
thing to do.  It usually involves calculating the CRC manually and
selecting the correct chunk of the result to select a bit for the
adapter to function.  The original driver that I worked on didn't have
this implemented at all.  AppleTalk 'phase 2' changed from using the
general broadcast address (all ones) to a specific multicast address
09:00:07:FF:FF:FF.  If your afapter software doesn't pick this up,
then it has SEVERE problems.  If you have re-compiled the kernel,
you must specify that multicast is provided for.  It turns out that
some drivers confuse hardware multicast (level 2, datalink) with
protocol multicast (level 3, netowrk).  They both have the same name,
but are quite different in their application.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Tom Watson         Generic short signature
[email-masked]     (I'm at home now)