Asking the Right Questions
I ran into some problems with a network card last night. It’s an old network card (3Com 905C) on an old server. The network card was working when I installed Gentoo over the old Red Hat 8 that was on the server, but when I moved the box downstairs the card sudden stopped. It was reporting a problem reading the MAC address off the EEPROM, at least as far as I can tell.
The weird thing is that if I put the card into another machine it seems to work fine. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a problem with the driver, the kernel, the machine or what. But I put a different card (3Com 905) into the server and all is fine again.
Anyway, while Googling for a potential solution to the problem, I ran into a great article from ESR titled ”How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.” The article is geared towards opensource software projects, but a lot of what ESR says is applicable elsewhere.
Wed, 16 Mar 2005 04:35 Posted in Linux
