A1200, OS 3.9, cnet.device... and no hope left

[Mikko_PKP]

OK, I am officially at my wit's end. I bought a PCMCIA network card off an Amiga retailer (guaranteed to work with my Amy, that is), put in the included piggyback fix for the A1200 cardreset bug and installed the OS 3.9 network package. However, that's where the problems started.

I cannot get the network to do anything useful. Usually Genesis gets me "online", but sometimes it just freezes the system completely and does nothing. I can usually resume operation by removing the card. Even when I do get "online" I cannot get A-Web to display a single page, it freezes the system as well - reads a few bytes, then freezes, continues after a while, freezes again. Occasionally I do get rid of the freezing, but then, DNS does not work.

I cannot ping the machine from my Linux box on the same network.

My setup:

A1200 (Commodore)
Blizzard A1260/50 + 64 MB FastRAM
2.1 GB internal HDD
OS 3.9


Network setup:

* Target Network 24007 10 Mbps PCMCIA card
* cnet.device 1.8b (standard version)
* D-Link 604 Router/Firewall
- DHCP activated (for Windows machines, Xbox & PS2 use), but Amiga assigned to a static IP (192.168.0.xxx) unused by anything else. Linux box works fine with similar static IP.
- Address of router (192.168.0.1) entered as gateway
- DNS server valid (from resolv.conf of my Linux box), entered as DNS server in Genesis
- No hostname/domainname entered at the moment, experimented with several...
* Internet access via a cable modem behind the D-Link so shouldn't really affect results.

Any help GREATLY appreciated.

[Mikko_PKP]

Yee-haw! I installed CardReset, removed the piggyback, and hey presto! For the first time I can actually load up web pages. Thanks a million!

[Mikko_PKP]

Yes, it is a thing that sits on the Gayle chip.

But more on the topic, all is still not well in the world of networking. A-Web now loads pages more often than not, the freezing has become more occasional, but BlackIRC and SimpleFTP crash, among others. I cannot help but wonder that there's still something wrong in my system.

[Mikko_PKP]

It's funny that everything worked fine until I put in the network stuff. And it seems to grow worse and worse, after the initial boot with CardPatch & CardReset everything was great, now Genesis has real trouble even finding the card.

And if I take the card out, everything works again. I have an external PCMCIA CD-ROM drive and that runs like there's no tomorrow. There's nothing funny in my startup-sequence or user-startup as far as I can see.

[Mikko_PKP]

That's easy to test, I'll try it on my laptop...

[Mikko_PKP]

Tested: card works fine on Windows XP.

[Mikko_PKP]

Checked the PCMCIA port, no bent pins.

[Mikko_PKP]

OK, the CardReset installation told me to install both... I'll try to remove CP now.

[Mikko_PKP]

With CardReset alone, it does something at least, but still freezes the system after a while.

[Mikko_PKP]

This solution gave the best results yet. I am actually able to open the amiga.com home page, even though it is tediously slow and the mouse pointer freezes from time to time. These could be features of A-Web II too, I suspect.

[Mikko_PKP]

No graphics card, that's right. I have a desktop A1200 and want to keep it that way.

I'll see what I can do about the browser issue IBrowse should be better, right? I think the only Amiga shop in the 1000 km radius has that.