ISA NIC card under 5.4R ??? (WD8003, non-PnP)

mailtrail substme at rc.tex-an.net
Mon Sep 19 11:40:24 PDT 2005


[sorry about the lack of subject line on original post]

On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Ean Kingston wrote:

> On September 19, 2005 01:57 pm, mailtrail wrote:

>> I needed a quick firewall to guard an ISDN line, so I grabbed a K6/166.
>> This box only came out of service a couple months ago, having run for
>> several years on 4.3-stable (set up some time in 2001).

>> The NIC card that is in it is an ISA bus card, a WD8003 (it was operating
>> as ed0 in its previous incarnation).  More for amusement than anything
>> else, I decided to use that card, if I could, with a recent version of
>> FreeBSD, so I loaded 5.4-R onto it.
>>
>> I now realize that I no longer have any idea how to tell the kernel how to
>> find a non-PnP ISA card.
>>
>> Here is the kernel.conf file from the old box:


>>    en ed0

> Interface ed0 (someone correct me if I'm wrong it's been a while)

So the "en ed0" command above is something along the lines of setting up a 
symbol for the rest of the configuration commands?  Or is it something 
along the lines of a CISCO IOS "interface fe0" command, that says the rest 
of the commands refer to fast ethernet 0?

>>    po ed0 0x300

> Port to interface ed0 id 0x300 (bit of physical memory to access the nic)

>>    ir ed0 10

> IRQ for ed0 is 10

>>    iom ed0 0xd8000

> I/0 memory for ed0 0xd8000 (for direct memory access IIRC)

>>    f ed0 0

> I forgot this one, sorry.


>>    q

I'm guessing the "q" command is "quit", but I don't know if it means 
"don't pay attention to any further lines in this config file", or if it 
means "that's the end of configuring ed0".  Does anyone remember?

>> I don't even remember what lines 1 and 5 mean.  How do I set IRQ, memory
>> address, etc for a non-PnP ISA card under 5.4-R, if that is even possible?
>> If not possible, is it supported under 4.11?

>From a websearch it looks like the kernel config worked just about the 
same at least as late as 4.9-R, but it seems that the only people using 
ISA cards these days are in places like the Czech Republic and other 
places where I can't read the web pages.  I couldn't even find a reference 
to using an ISA card under 5.4.  Anybody know how under 5.4-R?


>> This isn't critical by any means.  The motherboard has two open PCI slots
>> on it, so I could just use PCI NIC cards for the firewall, but I am
>> curious if the old cards can still be used.  I also have a second ISA NIC
>> card, a WD8013, so it would be somewhat amusing to have this box running a
>> firewall using those two old NIC cards.  The ISA bus should be able to
>> easily keep up with 128Kb of traffic; the old version of the box was a
>> mail- and web-server, and never had problems keeping up with ISDN speeds.


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