[CLUE-Tech] 3C509 ISA ethernet cards?

[Jim Ockers]

Hi CLUEbies,

Sorry for the spam.  For various technical reasons we've (my
employer) learned that we need about 500 3C509 ISA ethernet
cards.  We need twisted pair (3C509-TPO) transceiver only.

These cards have been discontinued for 3 years now and are
not available in the channel.  We'd like to buy new-in-box
if possible, from someone who bought a big pile of them when
3Com discontinued them.

Why, you ask?

We need ISA cards with Linux support which provide ETHTOOL_GLINK
link state reporting, using SIOCETHTOOL ioctl.  (ObLinux)

By the way you need to "ifconfig ethx up" to use ethtool 
to get the link state.  If the interface is down the 3c509 
driver reports that "link detected: yes".

The only other ISA ethernet card that is supported in the 
Linux kernel that provides ETHTOOL_GLINK seems to be is the
DEC ewrk3 (DIGITAL EtherWORKS 3).  Somehow I doubt that we
will find very many of those.

Any advice on where to get 3C509-TPO?  I found one possible 
place from an ebay listing, everything else I've tried is 
coming up short.  They are checking to see how many they
have.

Thanks,
Jim

PS After looking into it we believe that only PCI ethernet
cards support SIOCGMIIPHY ioctl (used by mii-tool).  Not sure
why; there are some (e100) drivers that include both mii.h
and ethtool.h from the linux includes.

PPS If my assumption that 3c509 and ewrk3 are the only possible
ISA cards is incorrect I welcome some corrected information.

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/