[wellylug] 3c509 NIC misery

[pmilne at paradise.net.nz]

I am mucking around with old 3C509's for incorporation into a firewall 
box.  I have tried configuring them with both 3Com's and Donald 
Becker's setup routines.  Although the ifconfig output and 
/proc/interrupts  say it is set to the IRQ that I intend, the 3C509 seems 
to have a mind of its own and signals the interrupt to IRQ=5, hence no 
return signal is 'received' for ping.  If I amend the 3c509 line in 
/etc/modules to 3c509 irq=5, then it pings fine (this is OK if you are 
using one card and the line is free, but it is a problem for multiple 
cards).  I am using a minimal Debian Woody system as the testbed.  I 
have only one card installed and I have shut down motherboard sound, 
serial ports and parallel port via the BIOS.

Is this likely to be a setup problem, or could the card be faulty?

regards
Peter