irq 255?

[Alan Mead <adm ipat com>]

I am the resident Linux fan which is hard for the programmers here to
swallow since I'm not a programmer.  I recently flubbed a chance to make
Linux shine and I'd like to understand what I did wrong.  In a nutshell, I
couldn't get the RH system to recognize the nics.  Here are more details,
as concisely as possible:

So the Novell netadmin here bought a 100TX hub and passed on the expensive
HP bridge thinking he could get NT to route IPX traffic between the TX hub
and our existing HP 100VG hub.  After some time he found that NT refuses or
cannot act as a bridge (I don't know why?) but I saw from the IPX HOWTO
that Linux can do this.  

So I had an old 486 RH 5.2 system available and I had the IPX HOWTO open
and my first step was to get two NICs running, one 100TX and one 100VG.
The computer had run an HP J2573 (ISA, 100VG/10) nic fine before.  I put
the HP NIC in with a new LinkSys Etherfast 10/100 (the newer LNE100TX
ones).  It wasn't my choice to buy LinkSys but their web page claimed that
the driver disk had a compatible tulip driver but their compilation
instructions specified an include which doesn't exist on my computer
(.../net/inet).  I got the lastest tulip driver which compiled.  When I put
the cards in, the system hangs when it tries to probe the HP card (i.e.,
even though it ran fine when it was the only card).  When I put the LinkSys
in alone, I can get the new tulip driver to load but the irq is 255 and the
card doesn't actually work.  I tried a nic which came with my Dell 1300
server which claims to be an Intel ExtherExpress Pro (but looks OEM) and it
has the same problem, the eepro100 driver loads but it's probed irq is 255.

I was forcing the probing with 'linuix ether=0,0,eth0 ether=0,0,eth1' at
the boot prompt.

So, any ideas what I did wrong?

-Alan
---
Alan D. Mead  /  Research Scientist  /  adm ipat com
Institute for Personality and Ability Testing
1801 Woodfield Dr  /  Savoy IL 61874 USA
217-352-4739 (v)  /  217-352-9674 (f)