Re: Problem booting with ISA card

[Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>]

Hemant Joshi wrote:
> 
> Hi Marty,
> Yesterday I repiled you that eb-4.7.20-ne.lzdsk did work.
> Atleast that the software detected the network card properly and proceed
> for DHCP.  From the system I could see that the DHCP could assign IP
> address(192.0.0.9) to the system.Then the system could get Linux image (zImage)
> from the DHCP server. But while it tried to mount the NFS from NFS server, it
> said following :
> 
> IP-Config : No network devices available.
> Root:-NFS : No NFS server available, giving up.
> VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy.
> VFS : Can not open root device 02:00
> Kernel Panic:VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00
> 
> And then no progress.
> What could be the problem?

That's an easy one: you didn't compile the driver for the network card into the
Linux kernel.  Thus it said: no network devices available.  You have to compile
your own kernel with the suitable driver for your card (NOT as a module!), or
alternatively use the kernels from the Linux terminal server project (www.ltsp.org).

Another option (however normally only viable if you have plenty of time and the
effort is worth it) would be to boot into an initial ramdisk with the NIC driver
in it and to use the linuxrc script to load it.  But as I said, this is probably
not worth the effort.

As a side note: you shouldn't use 192.0.0.0 as an internal network number, as it
is theoretically in use by someone else and your use may leak out by not properly
configured dialup connections etc.  The reserved numbers for internal networks
are either 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x (one class A, one class B or 256
class C networks).

Greetings
Klaus
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