Conflicted initialization of multiple 3Com 509s

Hi all,

I am setting up a small firewall with 3 3Com 509s in an old 486.

The 2.4.18 slackware kernel will boot and recognize one of the nics
and assign it to eth0 and 0x220. This card works and I can ssh into
the box from another on the same network.

Dmesg finds 3 ISA PnP cards but provides no information on
them.

snip
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: Card '3Com 3C509B EtherLink III'
isapnp: Card '3Com 3C509B EtherLink III'
isapnp: Card '3Com 3C509B EtherLink III'
isapnp: 3 Plug & Play cards detected total
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
snip

I have used el3 and 3c5x9 to reset the IOports and IRQs of the three
cards to 300,310 and 320, 5,7 and 9. And I've inserted an append
statement in lilo to assign the three nics to eth0 eth1 and eth2.
This produces the following initialization:

snip
eth0: 3c5x9 at 0x220, 10baseT port, address  00 60 97 e1 5e 85, IRQ
5. 3c509.c:1.18a [email protected]
http://www.scyld.com/network/3c509.html
eth1: 3c5x9 at 0x230, 10baseT port, address  00 60 97 e1 60 62, IRQ
10. 3c509.c:1.18a [email protected]
http://www.scyld.com/network/3c509.html
eth2: 3c5x9 at 0x240, 10baseT port, address  00 60 97 55 4a a1, IRQ
11. 3c509.c:1.18a [email protected]
http://www.scyld.com/network/3c509.html
snip


/proc/ioports and /proc/interrupts show only the one card, and the
three ports 220,230 and 240. There is no mention of ports
300,310,320, irqs 7,9 or eth1 or eth2.

So what's up? Why are the cards being initialized like this? What
can I do to regain control and use the irqs, ports and devices I've
assigned and in general, track down the problem? I'd appreciate any
and all comments, suggestions, and thoughts on the matter.
  
	bill