The thing is that I did post this last week and received no replies from anyone. Maybe no one else on this list uses the same NIC? I do feel though that SuSE's support policies should be discussed openly and not just in emails directly to SuSE. People should know what level of support (or lack of) they are getting when they purchase a SuSE package. I could understand SuSE's reaction if I have used a device which is not supported under Linux and which YAST was unable to find the correct driver for. However, in this case, YAST recognized the NIC, installed the correct driver but it does not work. As I mentioned, it used to work and still does with other distributions, so the problem maybe with the driver SuSE is using, maybe they have their own patch to the kernel source, I don't know. Shouldn't this be covered by their installation support? I think it should. Avi On Monday, Apr 28, 2003, at 13:40 America/Chicago, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

Again..why do people insist on sending this kind of thing to this list which is for users and the only SuSE people who even read it are Mads and Chris who have nothing to do with support policy. Send email directly to SuSE or call them.

I feel your pain but all this does is insight flamewar about support issues.

If you post the problem your having the users of this list might be able to help you. -- Avi Schwartz avi@CFFtechnologies.com

First, I am not complaining about people in this list not replying. I am pretty sure if someone knew the answer s/he would have replied. My beef is with SuSE reply, an no, I don't think that alt.os.linux.suse is the right place. Avi On Monday, Apr 28, 2003, at 15:15 America/Chicago, Preston Crawford wrote:

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 11:53, Avi Schwartz wrote:

...

The thing is that I did post this last week and received no replies from anyone. Maybe no one else on this list uses the same NIC?

I do feel though that SuSE's support policies should be discussed openly and not just in emails directly to SuSE. People should know what level of support (or lack of) they are getting when they purchase a SuSE package.

This isn't the place, though. This is for people using the system to get support, not to have to read flames. I agree, incidentally. The support you get buying Pro is a joke. My impression is they'll probably help you click through the yast2 install and that's about it. I've tried getting help via support before and was always basically told what I was asking wasn't covered under the support agreement. Essentially nothing is. But that's beside the point. Here isn't the place for that discussion. The newsgroup would be more proper, actually (alt.os.linux.suse).

And the same thing happens to all of us at times regarding questions unanswered. I've asked a couple times about my problem with missing gnome-pilot-conduits. No one has answered. But I don't hold that against anyone, because maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't want to give a wrong answer. Or maybe they're busy helping someone else. This is a volunteer peer to peer support list essentially. That's just the way it goes. I pay for the OS, not support.

Preston -- Avi Schwartz avi@CFFtechnologies.com

The 03.04.28 at 13:53, Avi Schwartz wrote:

The thing is that I did post this last week and received no replies from anyone. Maybe no one else on this list uses the same NIC?

I didn't read it till you mentioned here, but the solution wouldn't have occurred to me. I thought it was a driver bug.

I do feel though that SuSE's support policies should be discussed openly and not just in emails directly to SuSE. People should know what level of support (or lack of) they are getting when they purchase a SuSE package.

Me too. The list is about Suse Linux, and support is part of it, I think. IMO, SuSE should be more sensitive to these problems, specially when the user complains of something that could be more or less general, or even a bug in the supplied product, files, books, whatever. I have received better advice on this list :-) Mind you, I think suse makes probably the best distribution, or almost so, and I have bought it for years. But I think the support they give is insufficient - and before somebody says that I could buy more support, I'd say that I shouldn't have to pay anything for getting support or at least some help or advice on bugs/errors that are not mine. I think it goes with the warranty - again, in my opinion :-) The response "not covered by..." reminds me of a job I had at a telephone company by a contractor. If the complaint came with missing fields, we rejected it without reading, even if we new the solution. Policy from above :-( -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

Well, I tried the list but received no response at all. I am willing to give it another try though. Here is the information: was very happy with the way 8.2 installed on my Laptop at home last night. It was a breeze to setup even my wireless network. Happy, I went this morning to work, plugged the ethernet cable into the laptop's built-in ethernet port and then disaster... I cannot connect to the network. The laptop (an IBM Thinkpad A21p with a built-in mini-pci 3com 3C556B) worked fine with previous versions of SuSE, using the same driver. It also works fine with Gentoo Linux. Luckily, I have two HDs, the other one on which Gentoo is installed, so at least I was not out of commission, but I am not sure how to proceed from here. lsmod shows that the correct module is loaded (3c59x). The messages file shows the following: PCI: Enabling device 00:03.0 (0000 -> 0003) ... 00:03.0: 3Com 3c556B Laptop Hurricane at 0x1800. Vers LK1.1.16 At this point something must go wrong since all information regarding this card shows the values ff: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:03.0 to 64 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, IRQ 11 product code ffff rev ffff.15 date 15-31-127 00:03.0: CardBus functions mapped f0101000->d98be000 Full Duplex Capable Internal config register is ffffffff, transceivers 0xffff. 1024K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx Split, autoselect/<invalid transceiver> Enabling bus-master transmits and early receives. 00:03.00: scatter/gather enabled , h/w checksums enabled eth0: command 0x5800 did not complete! status=0xffff eth0: command 0x2804 did not complete! status=0xffff eth0: command 0x3002 did not complete! status=0xffff last message repeated 2 times. ifconfig shows a mac address of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff. I hope I didn't make a mistake in the text above. I have to take a snapshot of the screen with my digicam and then type the text manually... Any idea what may the problem be? Avi On Monday, Apr 28, 2003, at 13:40 America/Chicago, Christopher D. Reimer wrote:

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Avi Schwartz wrote:

...

"Please consider that our free installation support has a defined scope. Unfortunately, configuration of network cards is not covered within this scope, so please understand that we cannot answer the support requests you have submitted."

So what now, I am just SOL?

I think this is what the email list is for...

Christopher Reimer -- Avi Schwartz avi@CFFtechnologies.com

''You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.'' - Bill Cosby

I didn't catch. Did he say he was using external PCMCIA? I've found this to make a difference, personally. Preston

On 28.04.03,13:46, Avi Schwartz wrote:

The laptop (an IBM Thinkpad A21p with a built-in mini-pci 3com 3C556B) worked fine with previous versions of SuSE, using the same driver. It also works fine with Gentoo Linux. Luckily, I have two HDs, the other one on which Gentoo is installed, so at least I was not out of commission, but I am not sure how to proceed from here.

lsmod shows that the correct module is loaded (3c59x). The messages file shows the following:

PCI: Enabling device 00:03.0 (0000 -> 0003) ... 00:03.0: 3Com 3c556B Laptop Hurricane at 0x1800. Vers LK1.1.16

At this point something must go wrong since all information regarding this card shows the values ff:

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:03.0 to 64 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, IRQ 11 product code ffff rev ffff.15 date 15-31-127 00:03.0: CardBus functions mapped f0101000->d98be000 Full Duplex Capable Internal config register is ffffffff, transceivers 0xffff. 1024K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx Split, autoselect/<invalid transceiver> Enabling bus-master transmits and early receives. 00:03.00: scatter/gather enabled , h/w checksums enabled eth0: command 0x5800 did not complete! status=0xffff eth0: command 0x2804 did not complete! status=0xffff eth0: command 0x3002 did not complete! status=0xffff last message repeated 2 times.

ifconfig shows a mac address of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff.

I hope I didn't make a mistake in the text above. I have to take a snapshot of the screen with my digicam and then type the text manually...

Any idea what may the problem be?

Try to boot with acpi=off, and turn off wake-on lan for the card. You can also do a Google for this: eth0: command 0x3002 did not complete! status=0xffff You might find some more clues there. -- Jostein Berntsen

Avi Schwartz writes:

The problem indeed ended up being acpi. Adding acpi=off in the grub menu brought my NIC back to life.

Which shows that it was an "installation" problem, so should have been covered by "installation support".

On Monday 28 April 2003 13:40, Christopher D. Reimer wrote:

...

So what now, I am just SOL?

I think this is what the email list is for...

Just a dose of reality: Early on, I had some problems that I submitted to SuSE. To their credit, they were getting back to me, average response time was 24 hours. After 3 days of this (and, yes, we were tracking closer to an answer), I submitted the question here. 30 minutes later, my question was answered, my problem was solved, and I was up and running. Personally, I think this *IS* the support ... and it's excellent.