Reassigning IRQ

[Caroline Benton <caro tpc komae tokyo jp>]

Hello everyone. I am the newbie who asked for help settup up two ether
cards for a firewall about a week ago. Thank you for all your help. The
advice I received helped me identify my problem. But alas, I don't have
the skill to fix it (sigh).

My second card (a 3Com 3c509B ISA card) isn't being initialized. As
several posters suggested, I believe the problem to be an IRQ conflict.

The situation:

- At boot up, I get the message of failure for initialization of the
second card (eth1).
- After typing the command "ifconfig eth1 192.168.0.1 netmask
255.255.255.0 up", I get the response "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resources
temporarily unavailable".
- The dmesg command than shows that the card has been allocated an IRQ
of 10, which is already taken up by an external SCSI device (as shown by
"cat /proc/interrupts")
- Using netcfg, I tried to activate the second card, but I got an
initialization delayed response.
- The lsmod 3c509 command gives the status of the 3c509 module as unused.

As it was so kindly suggested, I disabled the PnP function using the
Window disks that came with the card. The output said that PnP was
successfully disabled. The card was still was not assigned a new IRQ
after start up.

My problem is that I do not know how to manually set the IRQ to another
number. I tried using the Adapter2 tab in linuxconf, and have added an
option statement in /etc/conf.modules (options 3c509 irq=5) to no avail.
I even physcially took out the offending SCSI card, only to have eth0
reassigned the IRQ of 10.


My questions:
How can I force a different IRQ?
How can I initiaze eth1? Will setting a different IRQ allow me to
initiaze eth1?
Is there a way to do so using the Window disks that came with the driver
(I tried after booting up with a Windows boot disk, but couldn't figure
out how to set a new IRQ).


I am sorry if these are very simple questions. Thanks again to everyone
who gave me advice the first time.



Caroline

PS When I restart the network services using /etc/rc.d/init.d/network
restart command, both eth0 and eth1 are brought up with no problems.