[wellylug] 386 firewall/router help

Venkatesh Sankaran venkatesh.sankaran at bigfoot.com
Thu Apr 24 22:31:30 NZST 2003


On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 14:29, Klenner, Colin wrote:
> I have acquired a 386sx Acer - nice little box. Very quiet. 
> It has 5MB RAM and 120Mb HDD, 1.44 FDD. 
> It has 2 x ISA slots so I can put a modem in one and a NE2000 compat NIC in
> the other.
> 
> Which I did.
> 
> It has Win 3.11 on the HDD so I verified everything else worked, the modem I
> have from another working PC.
> 
> I tried Freesco 0.26, 0.27 and 0.30 versions. First and last lock up during
> boot when they get to the 'loading packages' messge.
> 0.27 boots well, not problem, detects modem, even can boot of the HDD
> easily.
> 
> Problem is that it looks for an Ne-compat card on a PCI slot! 
> I can't figure out how to change the NIC driver or reconfigure it to look at
> ISA instead.
> 
> Any ideas or anything else suitable I can use? That I do not have to spend
> hours downloading?
> 
> ~~~
> Colin
> Reply to: colink at clear.net.nz

Colin,

I find that hard to believe (that FREESCO will only work with a
ne-compat card on a PCI slot!). I use FREESCO on a 486 that has an ISA
NIC card (although it is an NEC compat card), and this has been working
fine for over a year now!. I use FREESCO 027. Usually you get problems
if it doesn't find the card at the default IO and IRQ addresses. In such
cases you download a DOS executable from the manufacturer through which
you can either:

- configure the card to be on the default IO (0x300) and IRQ (10); or
- figure out the address the card has been configured at and specify
this when you set-up FREESCO.

I've had no troubles with FREESCO. I only run it on a floppy and tis
been doing a sterling job. I've tried CoyoteLinux as well, and the
set-up issues are similar for it too. If both of these do not work for
you then you might want to try smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org).
Although this will require a hard-disk based install ; 5MB memory might
be pushing it though.

HTH

Venkatesh




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