802.3 frames versus Ethernet II in redhat

[Rym]

I'm augmenting a network for a community group in my area with several linux (Redhat 7.1) servers (yea, I'm a nice guy ^_^) as they slowly wean themselves off of NT.

To make a long story short, for various reasons the existing network must use 802.3 instead of good old ethernet II, and switching is not an option. For the life of me, I can't get Redhat to use 802.3 with its TCP stack.

Is this network-card/driver specific, or is there a configration file somewhere I can mess with?

Thanks!

[genlee]

Are you are using tcp and not ipx? As far as I know, linux doesn't support 802.3 with tcp but you can use that with ipx with a command like:

ipx_interface add -p eth0 802.3

[Rym]

We're definitly not using IPX.

We've gotten all of the other systems on the network to use 802.3 over TCP, including some OS/2 servers, a bunch of thin clients, and several versions of windows.

If linux truly doesn't support 802.3 over TCP, would it be possible to set up a proxy to make the conversions based on MAC addresses? Or is there an alternate TCP stack available anywhere?

If there isn't a workable solution, we'll have to drop linux from the network altogether.

[genlee]

That is interesting since I didn't think windows used 802.3 for tcp/ip. Have you tried putting the linux servers on the network yet?

[Rym]

Windows supports 802.3 and Ethernet II with a simple toggle. It uses Ethernet II by default, but we've configured it to use 802.3 for compatibility with the older hardware on the network that doesn't use Ethernet II.

The linux servers are up and running, they just won't respond to 802.3 frames. They do respond to eachother's Ethernet II frames. (I've verified this by sniffing.)