Updates (Page 3)

January 16th

Well, after much fighting we have some success. After reseating the card a couple times, I pulled a DIP chip labeled "..MCiLC.." out and reseated that. The next time around it seemed to be working (I had switched to OpenTransport at this point), but the green lights still weren't on. Still, the Asante Installer seemed to detect it now. I couldn't get it to install because of some file called "Network" on the hard drive. Since it seemed to be working without installing anything I left it like that. A while later, after toggling a bunch of options I threw my hands up in the air, still no green light. So, I switched back to MacTCP. Again, no green light, but after poking around I got the settings right so that NCSA Telnet 2.6 (which I downloaded and put on the hard drive) would quit throwing errors about the settings. Thankfully I have a nice thick book with an error codes listing, so I was able to determine the nature of the errors. At this point I have the TCP/IP settings right (IP Address, Gateway Address, DNS Server Addresses), but the green lights won't come on on either the hub/switch/router so something is still wrong. By the way, it's spitting errors about not being able to contact the dns server... Any clues? Would having link integrity checking set help (I think there's a hardware jumper point for that)? Still, it is much better than it was.

January 17th

Hardly anything to add. It just doesn't want to connect to anything and I don't really want to buy any more network hardware right this second. At the moment i'm thinking about buying a DB-25 female connector (with solder points) and wiring that to a protoboard and using it and some wire to adapt a mac modem cable (male miniDIN 8 - male DB25) to connect the two macs. Can anyone confirm the pinout on this page link? I'd still appreciate knowing why the ethernet card won't play nice with my switch when the Apple AAUI Transciever (limited to 10Mbps) works fine with the same switch.

January 19th

Nothing further to report, except that the ethernet card wants a 10Mbps only hub/switch and I don't feel like buying something on the off chance that it might work. My suspicion is that the Asante card is reacting to the autonegotion in such a way that it assumes failure of the connection. I hope to buy a mac serial cable and mac-vga adapter (cause i really need to see both computers output to get it working and i've only got the one (Macintosh 12" RGB monitor)) sometime soon. I may get to a Radioshack at some point and cobble something together, but I doubt it. It's kinda looking like I probably won't get this done before the end of the winter warmup at the earliest, but I fully intend to get this stupid LCII on the internet. That is, eventually. :| Perhaps, assuming nothing bad happens, I will be able to do something for Retrochallenge in the future. :)

Last Updated: January 19, 2010

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