man on a cable mission

[Kardinal]

Well summers almost over here thank god and it looks like I'll still be using Linux in winter without access to the internet. Just can't seem to sort this out. I know I'm not the only one with this problem as I've seen some half posts about cable problems. Guess I just don't have the knowledge to get it going. I've even spent the last two days playing with the module.conf to try and get it working. Anyway I'll get to the point, I understand that Linux uses eth0, eth1 etc to identify your nic's. Man this might be ok for the adverage linux user but for newbies it's a damn nightmare. How the hell do I know which nic is eth0 or eth1? Under Hardrake (yeah I'm using mandrake) it shows the two cards that I have installed and also points to the modules these nic's are using. So I assume from the module that my realtek card is eth0 and my smc card is eth1. No problem, but under linuxconf it seems to be the other way around. So I've tried to assign different Ip's to the different card (using the old, try both routine) and still no luck (**** I think I need more then luck) Anyway. I've pretty much decided to rip out the nic I use in my home lan so that at least I'll know the card I'm playing with is the card to my cable modem. Aside from this, is there a totally 100% way of knowing which card linux see's as eth0 or 1? Also, I changed the module kernel that my nic's are using by following someones suggestions and editing module.conf but when I reboot and open up hardrake it says that nothing has changed, my cards are still using the same damn modules! So all I've learnt from this experience is that I am so ignorant I don't even know how to change what Linux see's. Could anyone throw some advice my way I'm losing strength here. Also I've tried www.cablemodeminfo.com (http://www.cablemodeminfo.com) and their links about linux and man, it seems that from over 3 million linux cable users no one has written a good nhf on the subject :(

[Bill]

Well, this might sound too simple, but when you don't know which NIC is using what IP, you ping something. Ping something that one NIC is supposed to see and the other isn't. When you see it pinging and replying, unplug the cable. If it still pings, that wasn't the NIC :)

Maybe no one mentioned it before, but Cat5 cables are hot swappable, you can unplug them and plug them back in at any time. Worst case scenario, you drop a connection.

Next up, after figuring out which NIC is on which IP, LABEL IT. So many people out there never label things because they are dumb enough to think that they will remember it six months from now :(

[jumpedintothefire]

can you check /var/log/messages for something
like:

Feb 1 23:56:01 sargent kernel: Adding Swap: 99784k swap-space (priority -1)
Feb 1 23:56:01 sargent kernel: ne.c:v1.10 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis
Feb 1 23:56:01 sargent kernel: NE*000 ethercard probe at 0x300: 00 00 e8 46 f0
Feb 1 23:56:01 sargent kernel: eth0: NE2000 found at 0x300, using IRQ 9.
Feb 1 23:56:02 sargent kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.99H 27May00 Donald Becker http://ces$
Feb 1 23:56:02 sargent kernel: eth1: 3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx at 0xff00,$
Feb 1 23:56:02 sargent kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/$
Feb 1 23:56:02 sargent kernel: MII transceiver found at address 24, status 7$
Feb 1 23:56:03 sargent kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame$
Feb 1 23:55:56 sargent inet: inetd startup succeeded

that is where the conf.modules file is read during bootup. Do you have an entry for your nic?

[[GoRN]]

dmesg | grep eth0
dmesg | grep eth1