Cant bring up network interface

[ogautherot at freesurf.fr]

Hi Nikhil!

Welcome to the BSD world! First, I think I must warn you
that this list is dedicated to beginners that want to get
started. Technical questions should be sent to
freebsd-questions at freebsd.org. And I think this one is
worth the effort because you seem to are facing something
that can be of interest also to more expert people.

However, see below...

> Hello,
>  I have just installed FreeBSD 5.2 on my system. My
> network card is National Semiconductors DP 83815 which
> is detected properly for interface sis0. But somehow I
> cant bring the interface up using DHCP. My machine is
> a dual boot, and the linux system gets the proper DHCP
> address.
>  I have observed that there is an LED for ENET on my
> Broadband modem. When i turn my machine on, this LED
> is ON. While booting as soon the messages for sis0 are
> logged, the led goes OFF.

The "newbie" answer I can give you here is to check what
your system actually configures. It sounds like your card
is loosing its carrier after the driver is loaded. I
remember seeing a similar effect with an old evaluation
card with a DP83815 when I was working for National
Semiconductor: I know there have been at least 2 drivers
for Linux (one for the eval card and one for the OEM cards)
and they don't seem to be compatible. It may be an issue with
the PHY. I eventually had to get rid of this card because
I was not able to use it with the 3 systems I was using at that
time (W98, Linux and BeOS); I was not a BSD user back then and
did not give it a try since.

My first bet would be to check the output of the command

  ifconfig -a

You should find an entry for your sis0 driver and some info
about what it did. In a second step, if your card seems
somehow doing something, try to force the IP address to 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0 using sysinstall and see if you can ping
10.0.0.137 (which should be the address of your DSL modem - it
is an Ethernet modem, right?). If it says that the network is
unreachable, it probably means that there is a compatibility
issue with the driver.

A third guess is to go to /usr/src/sys and check for the network
card driver sources (sorry, I'm not on my BSD machine right now)
and type "make install" (without the quotes). in case another
driver fits better...

Hope it helps
  Olivier