Greetings !
I just moved my BeBox from the closet where it stayed for the last 20 years and boot it without an issue, beside troubleshooting the video output as most modern monitors (at least mine!) are designed for 60Hz VGA signal and my BeBox was set on 75Hz…
So, it was quite an experience to showcase the possibilities of an almost 30-year-old computer to my son whose student laptop has 48 Gb of RAM. I was even able to run the 3D code that made me a BeOS Master in '97 
However, I couldn’t make the ISA network card work. I plugged a RJ45 cable directly to a switch connected to my home network, but the OS didn’t find about the connection. Also, the little lights on the card connector remained off.
As you can guess, I’m not so much of a hardware guy! What should I do to get the network working ?
Best regards,
Arnaud
I don’t own a BeBox but my first guess would be that the ethernet card is 10BASE-T(10Mbit) and the router or switch you are plugging in to is 100 Mbit or Gigabit only. You could maybe find an old 10/100 hub or switch to add in-between if that’s the case.
What is the model of the BeBox?
Do you have a Novel NE2000 card?
Can you set the network parameters directly instead of using dhcp?
I tried to do so, setting manually the IP address and the subnet mask, without success: no lights…
Your switch is probably too new as @Lrrr wrote.
What model is it?
Anyway you could connect the BeBox directly to another computer? Do you have a cross rj45 cable?
Nope, I don’t have a cross RJ45 cable. I will have to order one !
Regarding the switch, it’s a cheap TP-Link 10/100Mb…
Is this the original card and are you trying to keep it original? You may be able to find a different PCI card that may work.
Some of the drivers on this page claim to work with PPC BeOS. Some of the cards are cheap on ebay. Even if you wanted to keep it original, you might be able to tell if the card itself has a hardware issue, but I suppose you would get the same model to find that out.
Yes, that’s the original ISA network NE2000 card that was assembled in the BeBox by Be in 1996… I don’t even know the manufacturer !
Ah! Yes, that was mine 
I still have the code but don’t have a Haiku PC to try it on. I’ll try a port some time in the future…
So, I finally managed to get the NE2000 ISA network card working ! In fact, there is a small cavalier/selector between BNC and TP which was set on BNC (I was using a simple point-to-point network between my BeBox and the Mac Quadra I was using for development while in DR8).
DHCP is not working so I set a fixed IP address, subnet mask and gateway.
Unfortunately, I cannot connect to Internet with NetPositive as I’m not sure of the DNS I should be using…
For the moment, I’m able to connect via FTP to retrieve the sources from the HD, in tar.gz or zip formats. Would you have a recommendation regarding an app to extract those archives in (very) old formats ?
Best regards,
Arnaud
It should be supported by BeOS. Expander does it.
Otherwise the commands unzip and tar in the terminal are also working.
See:
I finally found a FTP client on Windows to copy the entire hard drive of the BeBox (700MB). Now, I can travel back in time !
In my experience DHCP doesn’t work well for NE2000 or DEC Nic’s under PowerPC. My C500 has one of those DEC cards and I need to manually configure it for it to work. I also had one card that only worked connected to a half duplex hub for some reason.
Congrats! If you need old PPC software: Some people have old archives with stuff that was released in the 90s. Maybe they can help.