Help turning old hardware into a firewall

[Ian Petersen]

Hello all,

I have an old HP Pavilion 8260 that I'd like to turn into a Smoothwall
firewall for my home network but I'm having trouble with the new
network cards that I bought for the internal and DMZ interfaces.  I
hope someone here can offer some suggestions.

The motherboard is a KL97-XV.  I have an old 10/100 network card based
on the Realtek 8139 chipset and it works fine with the 8139too module.
 I went out and bought two D-Link DGE-530T 10/100/1000 network cards
assuming they would work fine.  Googling suggests they would function
using the skge module, but it appears my motherboard is too old
because lspci doesn't even list the devices.  On the D-Link box, it
says I need a 32-bit PCI bus that is "Specification 2.2 Compliant".
Running dmesg on the machine lists, amongst lots of other things:

...
ACPI: Unable to locate RSDP
...
Local APIC not detected. Using dummy APIC emulation.
...
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd9c3, last bus=1  <---- is
this 2.10 relevant?
Setting up standard PCI resources
...
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
PCI quirk: region 8000-803f claimed by PIIX4 ACPI
PCI quirk: region 2180-218f claimed by PIIX4 SMB
Boot video device is 0000:00:0e.0
PCI: Using IRQ router PIIX/ICH [8086/7110] at 0000:00:07.0
PCI: Bridge: 0000:00:01.0
  IO window: disabled.
  MEM window: disabled.
  PREFETCH window: disabled.


The output from lspci is

livecd ~ # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440LX/EX - 82443LX/EX Host
bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440LX/EX - 82443LX/EX AGP bridge (rev 03)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 01)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 01)
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0e.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 264VT [Mach64
VT] (rev 40)
livecd ~ # lspci -x -t
-[0000:00]-+-00.0
           +-01.0-[0000:01]--
           +-07.0
           +-07.1
           +-07.2
           +-07.3
           +-0b.0
           \-0e.0

I've never had such trouble with hardware before, so I'm really not
sure what to do next.  I found a couple of forum pages suggesting that
a BIOS upgrade sometimes fixes problems similar to mine, but I have no
clue where to find such an upgrade.  (Googling has turned up little.)
Is it possible that the PCI hardware on the motherboard would support
PCI spec 2.2 if it had the appropriate BIOS?  Or should I just return
the cards and buy some 10/100 cards, instead?  (I'd rather not return
the cards because I bought them from TigerDirect, and I expect I'll
have to pay a restocking fee if I return them....)

Thanks,
Ian

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