The following list contains suggestions for solving problems with interface boards.
- Use boards that are certified by the Novell LabsTM group. Novell Labs bulletins are available at the WWW location
http://support.novell.com and on the Novell Support Connection CD-ROM.
- If you are using IBM* token ring boards, a shared RAM size of 16 KB is recommended.
- In most cases, the router-associated LAN and WAN boards can be installed with the Video Memory Addressing set to the factory default settings. However, the default settings for some boards might conflict with already installed VGA/EGA boards. To eliminate the conflict, reconfigure either the VGA/EGA board or the network interface board.
- If you are routing on an Ethernet board, set the maximum physical receive packet size to at least 1524 in the STARTUP.NCF file. If you are routing on a token ring board, set the value to at least 4540. These values include 10 bytes for PPP overhead.
- Before you install a LAN or WAN board, make sure that you check all the available interrupts, I/O base addresses, and memory map addresses for all boards. To avoid conflicts between board parameter settings, verify that the same values are not being used by multiple boards. For reference, the values typically used by a PC are as follows:
- COM1 uses IRQ-4, port=3F8-3FF
- COM2 uses IRQ-3, port=2F8-2FF
- LPT1 uses IRQ-7, port=378-37F
- LPT2 uses IRQ-5, port=278-27F
To determine valid settings for IRQ, I/O base, and memory locations, refer to the hardware documentation for each device. As you configure the router and WAN links, record this information on a worksheet to avoid any conflicts.
- The Novell NW2000 and Synchronous/+ boards have switches for changing only the I/O base address. The interrupt and memory are software-driven. When you use the Novell Internet Access Server Configuration utility (NIASCFG) to configure WAN boards, you can configure the I/O base address, interrupt, and memory map address. Verify that the NIASCFG I/O base settings match the jumper settings on the board.
The Synchronous/+ and NW2000 boards use a shared memory interface to the PC. Multiple Synchronous/+ boards can share the same memory address and multiple NW2000 boards can share the same memory address; however, different types of boards cannot be assigned the same address. When assigned an address below 1 MB, a Synchronous/+ board uses 64 KB of shared memory and an NW2000 board uses 16 KB of shared memory. When assigned an address above 1 MB, a Synchronous/+ board uses 512 KB of shared memory and an NW2000 board uses 256 KB of shared memory.
- When a command is issued to unload a board driver, all instances of that driver are unloaded. For example, if two Synchronous/+ boards are loaded, an UNLOAD SYNCPLUS command unloads both boards and all calls on these boards are terminated.
