[ILUG] Linux and the 3c5x9 card - strange one

[John_White at dell.com]

	Over the Christmas I encountered a very strange problem on the 3C509
card under linux . . . never seen anything like it, and hope never to again.
The machine was an AMDK6200 with 64 MB. Vanilla RH6.0 had just been
installed and during install, setup autoprobed the 3c509 card and picked it
up. IP was set up statically and everything seemed fine. On first boot the
machine wouldn't ping anything on the network (neither would anything ping
it)

The following was tried (not necessarily in this order).

Ping 127.0.0.1                                        <Success>
Ping 192.168.10.2 (systems IP Address)                <Success>
Ping remote host (192.168.10.1)                       <no luck>
Ping 192.168.10.1 after a cold boot.                  <no luck>
Setting the media type to BNC with 3c5x9cfg.exe       <no luck>
Install the card in another ISA slot                  <no luck>
Set IP Config to DHCP (we did have a working server)  <no luck>
Swapping the card for another 3c509                   <no luck>
Removing the soundcard with the MPU401 @300h		<no luck>
card diagnostics with 3c5x9cfg.exe				<Success>
card echo test with another card using 3c5x9cfg.exe	<Success>
Everything else above again                           <no luck>

I am promised that the card works fine in W95/98 but I have not seen it with
my own eyes (the other one does anyway). When I set the media detection to
"Auto select" and load the 3c5x9 module it picks up the card & the correct
media type. Also everything that should be in /proc is there.

arp -a had an "unresolved hw address" entry for whatever hosts we tried to
ping.

It seems like the card is seeing the network, and that linux is seeing the
card (yes there was only 1 network card in the system, no onboard card or
anything else like that). But there was no way it was saying anything.

Anybody got any ideas ?