Gentoo NIC problem

[Computer Hobbyist]

Well at someone's recommendation I downloaded Gentoo and decided to give it a try before I installed FreeBSD. That was day before yesterday.

I spent an hour last night and an hour the night before last and, well, I know why folks say gentoo is a tinkerers dream. I have run into a seemingly insurmmountable problem right off. The network is unavailable. Ifconfig just shows 127.0.0.1. The system has found eth0 and installed the right mod (3C59X) and all the lights work. The NIC works just fine in RedHat. Nothing. Dhcpcd doesn't do anything. Can't ping anything on either side of the router. It is like my system is setting behind a firewall and can't talk to any of my other of my machines or to the router. The only thing I haven't done yet is to add a hostname to the dhcpcd command, but I don't think that will work. I guess I could swap nics, but wonder if that would help, like I said the nic is working fine in RedHat.

I propose to fight anong this line all summer if necessary. FreeBSD can just wait.

Thanks for the challenge.

Any thoughts.

PS-- on reflection and after some research, it would seem based on the lack of a eth0 output, the system isn't recognizing the nic a 3c905b, but I know the correct module (same one that works in RedHat [3c59x]) and have use modprobe to manually add it, still nothing with Ifconfig. Funny when the machine boots it says it recognizes eth0 and then sends out a dhcp inquiry. Maybe my disk is bad?

[OOPS!]

Hi,

I ain't no expert on nics and networking, but have you looked in the etc/hosts file to see if you have a machine name besides the 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain? If not, then you will have to create one for it.

Does the server/router of your lan know about the "new" machine? If not, then you might have a firewall problem. Or lan config trouble.

Just some simple guesses. Hope they help you.

OOPS!

[Computer Hobbyist]

Oops, I have been thinking about the server not knowing about the "new" machine. I can really understand why the server could get confused. It has leased an IP to the other machine and now a nic with the same address is asking for a new lease.

I do note, however, that when I run ./net-eth0 restart I am told that the system fails to bring eth0 up. That I don't know why, since the system is correctly identifying the NIC and the driver it is installing is the correct driver. I do know that the NIC is running properly when I am in RedHat.

[Floppyman]

You know, this is interesting. When I set up Mandrake 9.1 on my other box just recently, which has that exact NIC (3com 3c905b), I also had trouble getting it to work. If I didn't go through the config options in the setup eth0 would fail during boot (even though DHCP was the default option and I really didn't need to go through the config). If I did go through the config screens, eth0 would come up ok. After I logged in though and KDE would load, the system would freeze at loading services. When I didn't configure the NIC during setup KDE would load fine. The problem then was that I couldn't configure the NIC anymore in KDE. No matter what I tried it wasn't able to obtain an IP from the router. After multiple reinstalls I finally decided that I would configure the NIC during MD setup so at least that would work. To deal with the logging in problem (which happened with Gnome too) I ended up booting in fail safe mode and disabling a couple services that I didn't need to have running anyway. Finally after ALL that, it worked fine.

I know all this really doesn't help you much though. Have you checked whether there could be any services causing a problem? A possible hardware conflict?

HTH

[Computer Hobbyist]

I have been thinking about a hardware conflict. There is only one other pci card in the computer, a sound blaster card, but who knows. Maybe if I use another NIC (I have dlink card around here someplace) or disable PnP or move the NIC to another slot it will all work. I am going to try all three.

[OOPS!]

Yes, definately disable the PnP. That is a notorious problem with Linux.

OOPS!

[mairving]

What is the result of the DHCP query? If you have a dynamic IP address, and it can't find a dhcp server, then it won't load eth0. Also if you have a fixed address but no network cable, it won't load eth0. Try doing it manually dhcpcd eth0.

[Computer Hobbyist]

Where is the log for the DHCP query? As near as I can determine the query is being made but nothing is being assigned.

I tried using dhcpcd eth0 several times,. No joy, I have also tried using dhcpcd -h "hostname" eth0 with the thought that the DNS server wanted a host name. Again no joy.

What you are telling me leads me to conclude that my NIC is not finding a dhcp server.

How can I get my router to listen?

Isn't there a command that lets you release your Dynamic IP address and then take out a new lease?




Your post

[Computer Hobbyist]

I have been able to manually configure eth0 and find everything on my side of the router. I am now convinced that the card is ok and the driver is correct. I then ran dhcpcd eth0 again and reset things to the io loopback. No joy with finding a dhcp server. I now suspect the problem is with the router settings. Of course the router runs fine with everything else hooked to it, so it isn't a hardware problem. It is the darn "Network is Unavailable" statement that thinks there is something wrong.

[Computer Hobbyist]

I never have been able to solve the problem. Heck I am not sure I really know what it is, but apparently it has something to do with the DHCPCD daemon on the LiveCD (however it is spelled.) Rather than abandon gentoo altogether somebody has suggested I install gentoo using KNOPPIX. I think it will work, anyway I am going to give it a try. KNOPPIX is an interesting distro. Linux on a cd -- loads everything it needs into memory (and that which it doesn't load it pulls off the cd as needed.) Glad I was told about it. It is going to make a very good repair tool.

BTW KNOPPIX has no problem with dhcp. The network came right up, found the internet with on problem at all.