Strange Modem

[Rick Stevens]

brad.mugleston at comcast.net wrote:
> I just built a file server using an old Pentium II with FC2 but
> it's got a 180G hard drive on it (for home use).  When I hook it
> into my home network everything works great - the switch assigns
> it an IP address and it seems to work fine.  BUt after awhile the
> modem starts rebooting.  If I unplug the network cable from the
> comuter the modem goes back to normal.  I've tried two different
> NIC's in the computer and they both do the same thing.
> 
> Any ideas?

Uh, serial modem or PCI-based?  If it's PCI, have you looked at the IRQ
assignments between the modem and the NICs?  (lspci -v)

Even with a serial modem, it's possible (especially if you're using
/dev/ttyS1, aka COM2) for the NIC to try to use the same IRQ (IRQ3).

You can also "cat /proc/interrupts" along with "cat /var/log/dmesg" to
see what's using what.

> About the only other thing funky on this is it will not go into
> the graphical mode, doesn't like the card/monitor configuration
> (again, I've used two video cards and two monitors but same
> results.  This is fine as I don't really plan on using the
> computer that way - it's just suppose to store all my music and
> pictures on it...

Have you checked the X startup log to see what it doesn't like?  It may
also be an IRQ conflict (not uncommon for video cards to use IRQ9 for
video retrace interrupts...and that can conflict with the IRQ cascade
to the second 8259 controller).  In fact, a machine that old quite
likely will have IRQ issues.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  Memory is the second thing to go, but I can't remember the first! -
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