I'm having trouble getting my networking functional in my new Gentoo installation that I finally managed to get booting:rolleyes:
It seems to be recognizing my built-in network card okay, and dmesg doesn't give any errors, but it just won't grab an IP from our DHCP server. The same computer works fine under Mandrake.
I'm using the nvnet driver, but I've also tried compiling in the forcedeth (This is the nf2 board in my sig) with no success. I did remove forcedeth before trying nvnet.
I'm just not sure where to start troubleshooting the problem. I've tried Googling and even posted to the Gentoo boards (no help there so far), but most of the problems I found other people having were related to getting their cards recognized at all, so they don't seem to help me much. Any ideas where I can start looking for trouble at least?
VoiDeR
09-01-2004, 04:20 PM
Type as root ifconfig -a and see if eth0 is listed. You might have to asign it an ip. Check man ifconfig and it will tell you what you need to know. Also did you set /etc/conf.d/net like in the install instructions. Also check and make sure that /etc/init.d/net.eth0 is set to the default runlevel by typing
rc-update add net.eth0 default
reboot and see what happens then.
VoiDeR
bosox79
09-01-2004, 04:31 PM
just to add to what VoiDeR posted you may find the Configuring your Network secition of this document helpful
http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/35
HTH
Bosox
fatTrav
09-01-2004, 04:36 PM
I have an nforce2 board and had no problems with forcedeth. did it grab an IP when you were using hte live cd? you did 'rc-update add net.eth0 default' right??
aside: has gentoo ever been installed with zero errors following the handbook word for word??:confused:
bosox79
09-01-2004, 04:47 PM
aside: has gentoo ever been installed with zero errors following the handbook word for word??
fatTrav,
I truly doubt that, everyone makes typo's, this is one of the reasons I used anaconda,/vida because I make typo's all of the time;)
fatTrav
09-01-2004, 04:54 PM
Originally posted by bosox79
fatTrav,
I truly doubt that, everyone makes typo's, this is one of the reasons I used anaconda,/vida because I make typo's all of the time;)
i never make typos or spell things wrong. just check my previous posts:D But seriously, I cut-n-paste most of the commands from the install doc and found I needed G4L to solve a few problems. i was just curious how others fared with the gentoo install docs. i mean, having 'emerge sync' and 'emerge system' fail during the install isn't a good sign...
bosox79
09-01-2004, 05:20 PM
having 'emerge sync' and 'emerge system' fail during the install isn't a good sign, I totally agree with you, without emerge gentoo is pretty hard to setup & install
cybertron
09-01-2004, 05:38 PM
ifconfig does show eth0 as an interface, but it has no ip address. If I try to assign it the IP address it gets under Mandrake, then when I try to ping my other computer it tells me that the network is unreachable. One weird thing that I noticed during boot is that it says "Keeping kernel configuration for eth0" toward the end. Not sure that helps any, but there it is FWIW.
I have done the rc-update add net.eth0 default, but I tried removing it and adding it again anyway. Still no change.
I just rebooted it with the LiveCD and it grabs an IP address automatically like it should. It's different from my Mandrake one, but that's to be expected and it still falls within the valid range.
fatTrav
09-01-2004, 05:56 PM
is /etc/conf.d/net set up right?
VoiDeR
09-01-2004, 09:23 PM
When you asign it an ip with ifconfig odds are you will have to asign it gateway. When i installed this is what i had to do to get my network up.
But if your /etc/conf.d/net file is set up right and its set to run in the default runlevel you shouldnt have to do this. Also make sure your /etc/resolv.conf file is right. Gentoo makes setting up your network easy. Just read the docs and follow word for word.
VoiDeR
cybertron
09-02-2004, 05:01 PM
This is the only uncommented thing in /etc/conf.d/net:
iface_eth0="dhcp"
My resolv.conf looks correct too. It's basically the same except that one line is moved and the other isn't included. Would that cause a problem?
Gentoo:
I didn't try the route add thing so I'm not sure whether it got my default gateway right or now. I'll have to give it a shot when I get a chance, but I'm not sure our network admin will let me leave it as a static IP anyway.
fatTrav
09-03-2004, 04:22 AM
odds are your sysadmins wouldn't care about a handful of static ips on their network. i know at my school (prolly a mirror of luther) the sysadmin set up dhcp to start serving out IPs at the *.*.*.128 range. He did it on the odd chance someone needed a static ip for some sort of server for class related reasons.
XiaoKJ
09-03-2004, 07:08 AM
Originally posted by fatTrav
aside: has gentoo ever been installed with zero errors following the handbook word for word??:confused:
When I first installed, yes. I think I am kind of paranoid on these -- I check every command I enter, and the USE settings? I copied on paper
XiaoKJ
09-03-2004, 07:08 AM
are you using a reiser4 enabled kernel? mine had the same problem
cybertron
09-08-2004, 12:25 AM
Oops, I missed the replies to this in the e-mail outage recently. It's late now and I still have homework to finish, but I'll check on reiser4 next time I get a chance. I also haven't gotten a chance to try specifying the gateway, so there's another possibility.
cybertron
09-10-2004, 06:12 PM
Finally convinced myself to reboot and kill my record uptime that I had amassed on this system (which is only 8 days, but for someone who used to only have a laptop that got shutdown every day that's a lot:)).
Anyway, I found something interesting. It is actually sending a DHCP request to somewhere, but I don't have the faintest idea what's happening to it. It also convinces me that it is correctly connected to the network (since it can send packets), but for some reason the request isn't getting to the DHCP server or the server isn't responding, because I don't see any packets coming back. To find all this out I used tcpdump, so here's the output from that (some of these aren't coming from my computer, the ones that are have a physical address starting with 00:50, also, the ones relating to address 172.23.17.200 are my laptop that I tcpdump'd from, if that makes any difference):
I did try specifying the IP address and the gateway, but it still didn't work. I also couldn't find a reiser4 option in my kernel config, so I don't believe that's there either.
So since my computer is requesting an address, does that mean that the server just doesn't like it for some reason?
cybertron
09-12-2004, 12:52 PM
What the???
There are no dhcpd processes running to receive the address when it comes back from the server. No wonder I can't get an address. Where do I install that from? It doesn't even seem to be installed for some reason (looking in /usr/sbin/). I can't believe that I just missed it on the packages CD the first time around. Or does Gentoo not use dhcpd for that (I noticed that Mandrake doesn't, but it does have dhclient that does the same thing)?
I guess this is progress. At least I have an idea of what's wrong.
cybertron
09-12-2004, 01:46 PM
Okay, so I chrooted from Mandrake with a working network connection and emerged dhcp (why wasn't that included in the first place?:confused: ), but I'm not sure where to go from there. I tried running dhcpd and dhclient. dhcpd I just couldn't get working, and dhclient doesn't find any dhcp lease offers. I'm not sure what kind of dhcp configuration I would need to do, so is there a good how-to somewhere on how to do this (if I in fact need to, correct me if I'm wrong on that).
fatTrav
09-12-2004, 02:35 PM
I dn't think there are any conf files for dhcp other than your networking conf files.
Have you tried a static IP?
cybertron
09-12-2004, 02:49 PM
So I don't need either dhclient or dhcpd running to get an address from the server?
I did try assigning an IP manually and adding the default gateway, but it still didn't work.
fatTrav
09-12-2004, 03:54 PM
If you specifiy a static ip, no you won't use dhcp. you just have to get all the fields right (ip, broadcase, netmask).
check the gentoo forums. i had found something similiar to your problem but i closed that tab ... i'd look it up but the forums ain't loading for me.
have you re-tried forcedeth? i use it with no problems in gentoo.
cybertron
09-13-2004, 06:35 PM
Originally posted by fatTrav
If you specifiy a static ip, no you won't use dhcp. you just have to get all the fields right (ip, broadcase, netmask).
check the gentoo forums. i had found something similiar to your problem but i closed that tab ... i'd look it up but the forums ain't loading for me.
have you re-tried forcedeth? i use it with no problems in gentoo.
It does show that all the fields are right, but it doesn't work with a static IP. That was more in reference to whether a DHCP address would work without dhcpd or dhclient running.
Do you remember what you searched on in the Gentoo forums? I have checked them and even posted a topic about it but didn't find anything helpful there. I'm going to go look again though.
I haven't retried forcedeth, but since it definitely is sending packets I don't think that it's a driver problem. I'll try it again anyway.
I just noticed something else. When I assign a static IP and try to ping my laptop, I see a bunch of this in tcpdump on the laptop (BubbleLightXP is the hostname of the computer that's not working, 172.23.17.200 is the laptop):
17:29:38.176676 arp who-has 172.23.17.200 tell BubbleLightXP
17:29:38.176715 arp reply 172.23.17.200 is-at 00:08:74:02:1f:66
I don't know if that's helpful at all, but clearly it is sending out an ARP request and it is getting replied to. I find it suspicious that it isn't being referenced by IP, but instead by hostname. That doesn't seem to happen with anything else that I've seen looking through tcpdump. Would I have configured something wrong for it to do that?
fatTrav
09-13-2004, 06:43 PM
Originally posted by cybertron
Would I have configured something wrong for it to do that?
As far as I know the only conf files I had to edit were /etc/conf.d/net and /etc/hosts. I never bothered with /etc/resolv.conf
I searched for "dhcp not working" "dhcp not responding" and looked for subjects that indicated the user was having "odd" problems.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=217930&highlight=dhcp+working this one might be promising...
also, are you sure you specified the static ip stuff correctly?? i've never known a static ip not to work if everything was set up properly
cybertron
09-13-2004, 07:17 PM
All my config files seem fine, I've double-checked them and I think they're posted elsewhere in this thread too. resolv.conf looks essentially the same as Mandrake through no fault of my own so I think that should be okay.
forcedeth did the same thing as nvnet. I tried it as a module this time too just in case. It loaded fine but same symptoms as before.
Unfortunately the solution to the Gentoo thread was getting a new card. I don't think I'm really up for that just yet, sinceMandrake keeps me happy, but Gentoo is just so cool:)
The static IP really didn't work. When I try to ping my laptop I get all Destination Host Unreachable messages, www.google.com gives me "ping: unkown host www.google.com" and pinging our CS server by IP gives me "connect: Network is unreachable" like in the thread you linked to.
So maybe I'm just screwed again with Gentoo?:confused:
cybertron
09-13-2004, 07:31 PM
One more thing.
Reading through a thread at the Gentoo forums I thought to do lsmod and see if forcedeth was used by anything. It wasn't, it just has a - in the Used by column. Is that bad?
fatTrav
09-13-2004, 07:39 PM
Originally posted by cybertron
One more thing.
Reading through a thread at the Gentoo forums I thought to do lsmod and see if forcedeth was used by anything. It wasn't, it just has a - in the Used by column. Is that bad?
I'm pretty sure it means it isn't being used. Any module I've ever had loaded and used has some stuff in that "used" column. What is the output of 'route -n' when you are using Gentoo either with dhcp or static ip? (you may need to emerge it b/c it isn't in the base system...i think)
cybertron
09-13-2004, 08:26 PM
It shows nothing with DHCP and everything that Mandrake does except the gateway when I assign it manually. I can add the gateway, but it still doesn't work. I can post the full output later if it would help, but I don't have time to reboot now (or write this post, but I'm doing that anyway;)).
Oddly enough I find in my kernel logs that forcedeth should be in use:
Sep 13 22:34:50 [kernel] eth0: forcedeth.c: subsystem: 0147b:1c00 bound to 0000:00:04.
cybertron
09-16-2004, 06:48 PM
Here's route -n for Mandrake (on my laptop, should be the same for the desktop):
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
172.23.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 172.23.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
and Gentoo (static IP after I route add my default gw):
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
172.23.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 172.23.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
Using DHCP it's empty.
I also tried manually inserting the forcedeth module in case it wasn't loaded properly, but that didn't seem to work either. I googled the lsmod showing a - in used by thing, but didn't really find anything helpful. Looks like it's about time to format this partition so I can quit messing with it:)
bosox79
09-16-2004, 07:08 PM
if you are going to format give vida a shot:) see my sig
cybertron
09-16-2004, 07:23 PM
I heard about that recently and it does look interesting. Does it work like a regular Gentoo installation once it's up and running? Mostly, can I still use emerge like I would anyway? That's the main reason I'm still trying with Gentoo. Otherwise I probably would have given up on it a long time ago.:)
bosox79
09-16-2004, 07:54 PM
yes you can the installer uses Anaconda to perform a stage 3 install & then emerges xfree & Gnome automatically ( at least the beta 2 ISO does ) and then when you boot into the system you are dropped into GDM Grub is also setup during the install processes. check out the site for screen shots. edit I just attempted to access the site and it seems to be down at the moment
HTH
Bosox
digitize
09-16-2004, 10:55 PM
Bleh, Im in the same situation. I have a nforce2 board, with an onboard nic. I've finally installed gentoo, up and running in kde, except i can't get my nework working. Now it worked during the installation by way of forcedeth, so i had that load on bootup. Now if i boot up i have an HWaddress while /sbin/config, but then when i dhcpcd (i have dhcp in my /etc/conf.d/net file) i can't retain an address and the HWaddress goes away, after such a long time of installing gentoo, and the emerge system being win. Also, i try to emerge nvidia-net and i get an error, same with nvidia-audio (nvidia-kernel has already been emerged). So right now im stuck up a creak w/out a paddle, any suggestions.
bosox79
09-16-2004, 11:13 PM
not really sure what to do in this situation, the only thing I could think of that may or may not have been mentioned already is to make sure you compiled support for your nic into the kernel either directly or as a module
fatTrav
09-16-2004, 11:26 PM
Originally posted by digitize
Bleh, Im in the same situation. I have a nforce2 board, with an onboard nic. I've finally installed gentoo, up and running in kde, except i can't get my nework working. Now it worked during the installation by way of forcedeth, so i had that load on bootup. Now if i boot up i have an HWaddress while /sbin/config, but then when i dhcpcd (i have dhcp in my /etc/conf.d/net file) i can't retain an address and the HWaddress goes away, after such a long time of installing gentoo, and the emerge system being win. Also, i try to emerge nvidia-net and i get an error, same with nvidia-audio (nvidia-kernel has already been emerged). So right now im stuck up a creak w/out a paddle, any suggestions.
have you tried a static ip? or the gentoo forums?
i can't say i've had any problems with my nforce board and forcedeth...I compile forcedeth into my kernel and no problems with dhcp or static.
digitize
09-17-2004, 10:54 AM
I've tried both static and and dynamic (I have a static ip as it is). Anyway, how exactly would you compile forcedeth into the kernel? I've emerged the nforce-net module, but have never really tried to actually compile the forcedeth module into the kernel.
fatTrav
09-17-2004, 02:37 PM
I never fooled with emergeing any nvidia stuff from portage. At teh time, the nvidia graphics driver was a few revisions behind and portage wanted to d/l the gentoo devel kernel. which i had no need/use for since i use a vanilla kernel.
what i did: I used menu config to put a * (means compiling directly into the kernel) for sound (i810) and my forcedeth. To do so, just navigate to Device Drivers -> Network -> Ethernet 10 mbit -> EISA, PCI On board controllers -> Reverse Engineered nForce Ethernet. Then I compiled the kernel as usual. Never had a problem.
cybertron
10-12-2004, 07:29 PM
Just a quick update on my situation: I never did get around to reformatting the drive, and eventually one of the devs on the Gentoo forums replied to my post there. He suggested disabling USB in the kernel, and guess what, it worked! And guess what else, my only mouse is USB, as are my printer and digital camera, which makes the solution somewhat useless to me.:rolleyes: I've posted back to the forum there in hopes that there is another better way to resolve the problem and will report back if there is.
bosox79
10-12-2004, 08:05 PM
cybertron,
Thanks for the update & keep us posted.
cybertron
10-12-2004, 08:42 PM
Well, his recommendation was to update my kernel to the latest version, so I guess I'll be trying that. Unfortunately, when I did try the 2.6.8.1 kernel from kernel.org (couldn't figure out how to emerge newer sources), it refused to boot again. I gave up on it pretty quick because I didn't think it was going to work anyway, but now I guess I'll have to make a more concerted effort.;)
Anywho, that's the best solution I have for anyone who comes across this thread and has a similar problem. Hope this saves someone the month and a half I've spent trying to get it working (okay, I did leave it alone for quite a while there, but it really has been a month and a half:p).
fatTrav
10-12-2004, 09:06 PM
Originally posted by cybertron
couldn't figure out how to emerge newer sources
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml
emerge -av gentoo-dev-sources
damn, zsh portage auto-completion kicks as*
bosox79
10-12-2004, 09:22 PM
damn, zsh portage auto-completion kicks as*
yes it does :D and when I fell really lazey genkernel is nice to have around too
cybertron
10-13-2004, 08:03 PM
Originally posted by fatTrav
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml
emerge -av gentoo-dev-sources
damn, zsh portage auto-completion kicks as*
Also, emerge --sync to get the newest portage tree.:) That's why I was having trouble finding it.
cybertron
10-15-2004, 08:47 PM
Score!:D
I'm writing this booted into Gentoo, so my mouse and network are coexisting nicely:) To review, the complete solution to the problem was:
emerge --sync
emerge gentoo-dev-sources
compile new 2.6.8 kernel - For my SATA drive I had to enable the deprecated ATA SATA support for now until I figure out what I'm supposed to use instead. Also, don't forget to turn USB back on if you shut it off like I did.
setup lilo to point to your new kernel
run lilo
reboot and your network and USB should work:)
enjoy:cool:
Thanks for all the help everybody.
bosox79
10-16-2004, 05:32 PM
congrates cybertron I am glad everthing is now working and your welcome:cool:
cybertron
10-16-2004, 09:08 PM
Yeah, now if only emerge hadn't decided to ignore me when I passed the --usepkg option;)
How long do you think KDE is going to take to re-emerge?:D
fatTrav
10-17-2004, 01:49 AM
Originally posted by cybertron
Yeah, now if only emerge hadn't decided to ignore me when I passed the --usepkg option;)
How long do you think KDE is going to take to re-emerge?:D
about as long as you prolly sleep each night, if not a bit more. although it wasn't that bad with GNOME on my 2800+ athlon xp system, it was still a few hours.
bosox79
10-17-2004, 08:02 PM
on my XP 1800 it took about 12 hours :D
cybertron
10-17-2004, 10:38 PM
It actually didn't take all that long. I started it and left about an hour or two later. When I came back about 4 hours after that it was done. I can live with that, since I now have the latest version and it's compiled optimized for my system.
I only have about 4 QT themes available in qtconfig though, and none of them are any good. My QT apps look horrible right now. That's the nice thing about having Mandrake up and running nicely though. I can play with Gentoo when I have time, but if I have trouble with something and don't have time to fix it I can always reboot and Mandrake is still there as my safety net.:)
Eventually I want to switch full-time though:)
bosox79
10-17-2004, 11:09 PM
There is no rush but the graet thing about gentoo is ounce
you have it setup the way you want you do'nt need to touch it again and emerge makes upgrading software so easy:D Gentoo truley is a wonder of a distro:cool:
cybertron
10-18-2004, 12:53 AM
Yep, that's one of the reasons I was so stubborn about getting it to work. The idea of never having to do another complete reinstall to upgrade is very appealing. Just "emerge -u world" and come back in a couple of days and you're up to date:D
bosox79
10-18-2004, 12:58 AM
yep having Gentoo as my main distro has made my life just a little eaiser
fatTrav
10-18-2004, 01:45 AM
I agree. Gentoo and emerge are nearly perfect and is the best package manager out.
justlinux.com
Copyright 2007 Jupitermedia Corporation All Rights Reserved.