Everything you always wanted to know about configuring WD and SMC ether cards. These cards come in a wide range of flavors. The dumbest cards have no interface chip, and everything must be configured by jumpers. This setup program will do little except auto-locate the card's I/O address. Other cards have an interface chip, and you can use this setup program to configure the card's soft eeprom values. *************************************************************************** Skip this section unless you have to know everything. Confuse-a-user LTD. There are so many pieces of the configuration puzzle, it is very confusing at first. 1. There are configuration registers in the interface chip. The values in these registers may be changed at any time, and the configuration immediately changes. (Try writing into the I/O base address register - your card moves itself to some other address!) 2. There is an EEPROM with a soft configuration page (page 0). The wdsetup program displays, and if you choose to, modifies the soft configurarion page. There are also other pages that hold hard configuration set-ups. (We could be nasty and change these, but by convention they are set at the factory, and always stay the same. 3. There are a few jumpers on the card which select which EEPROM page will be copied into the configuration registers at power up. Sooo, even if you run the configuration program, but have the jumpers set to use one of the hard config eeprom pages, you will end up with the same old configuration. wdsetup will detect that, and warn you. ***************************************************************************** Using the wdsetup program. 0. Since this program has not been widely tested, it would be wise to have the Dos(yuck) ezsetup program handy in case something goes wrong. 1. You must be root, or install the program suid root. 2. Just type ./wdsetup and see what happens. You will have the option of bailing out without changing anything. Or hit control-C to abort if you change your mind after starting to enter new information. 3. To see the current configuration registers, use the option -r. 4. To see a verbose version of the registers, use the option -v 5. To see a dump of the eeprom, use the option -e 6. If there is a problem with the auto recognition, use -a 280 (replace 280 with your card's actual address). And please report the problem clearly to me. 7. If you have a new card with twisted pair, thin and thick coax, please run ./wdsetup -e > eefile, and mail me the file. I need the info for one of those cards. Also tell me the model of the card you have. - Gregg Weber gregg@netcom.com