Help turning old hardware into a firewall

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 03:52:22PM +1859, Ian Petersen wrote:
> 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?

I don't believe PCI 2.2 has a new software interface, so probably not.
I suspect it is just a "This is compatible with the PCI 2.1 BIOS
interface standard".

> 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....)

A bios upgrade won't change the version of PCI (that is a hardware
thing).  It could fix bios bugs however.

You could try the -M option for lspci which is supposed to ignore
misconfigured bridges and go through a very thorough bus scan looking
for devices.

One _major_ difference between pci 2.1 and 2.2 is that PCI 2.2 MUST
provide 3.3V, and PCI 2.1 may provide 3.3V.  If the card requires PCI
2.2 it may be that it requries a 3.3V rail on the PCI connector, which
it is quite likely something as old as a 440LX machine doesn't have.
Without that power rail the chip on the card might not even power on.
After all many modern chips use 3.3V for their processing cores, even if
they are using 5V signalling.  If this is the case, then those cards
will never work on that system it would seem.  I wonder if the version
of the card is what determines the need for PCI2.2 since I have found
some indications that some DGE-530T cards only need PCI2.1, but dlink is
one of those companies that likes changing card designs without changing
model numbers so you never know what you are buying.

--
Len Sorensen
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