Asus P4P800-MX networking problem

[Muzster]

Evening all.

Just taken the plunge and installed Linux for the first time. Debian (3.1 R0A, from a DVD install) onto a machine with the above motherboard. It's a clean install, no other OSes around etc. The NIC worked fine under Windows XP Pro (EDIT: the NIC is a Realtek 8101L), however under Debian, there are two issues.

1) It refuses to connect to any machines that aren't on the same switch as it. (Hence DHCP from my router didn't work, had to configure network settings manually)

2) The indicator LEDs on said switch indicate the NIC is running at 10Mbps in half duplex mode. Errrr.... I really have no idea what could cause this beyond a hardware fault, which is clearly not the case as it ran fine under Windows. Can anyone shed any light on this issue? Had a quick search of the forums here, and of Google, nothing I came up with was of any help.

Thanks,

Muz.

[DSwain]

From searching a little bit for your motherboard, I found this:

http://www.linux-tested.com/results/asus_p4p800-mx.html

Which shows that the NIC provided no problems... I think the first place to start is to figure out what module that network card uses. lsmod is probably a good start, and also maybe lspci to verify which network card it's using. If you can identify which card it is and the module, you may want to try to reload the module by using the command modprobe modulename. Also, you have to verify that the machine is configured to run DHCP at start up. I'm not exactly sure of the Debian method of setting up the rc files, but in some cases a file called /etc/rc.conf is available to be edited and an entry would be modified to start DHCP. If not that, then try something like dhcpcd eth0 after loading the module.

I'll look around a little more to see if I can find some other ideas for you in regards to this particular NIC.

[EDIT] From some more searching, I came across this (http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about10580-15.html) . Not the same issue, but it had dmesg listed which is good. Interestingly enough, it had the network listed as the 8139too driver. Check out lsmod for that module, and try to reload it as I said above.

On even another thought, I came across this (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/307781) also. It's somewhat old, but it shows that there may be some problem listed within the 2.6.12 kernel that may have never been resolved. I doubt this is the case, as this is semi-old now, but it could be something to keep in mind. An update to your kernel may be something critical to do, but hopefully not.