Disabling/Enabling a NIC?

[Jestah]

Hello everyone.

I have a problem. I'm dual booting both RedHat Linux and Windows XP on my Sony Vaio. About a week ago, my NIC stopped working and I had to go out and purchase a new one. Anyway, to get back on to the internet I had to disable the first NIC and enable the second one. That wasn't a problem in XP but I can't figure out how to do it in Red Hat. Can someone walk me through it? Id really appreciate it, thanks :)

Jay

[do_guh_new]

redhat should have kudzu installed which detects new and /or removed hardware on boot and configures/unconfigures it for you, do you have kudzu installed?

[Jestah]

Well I'm pretty new to linux so I don't exactly know what kudzu is. If it comes with RedHat I'd imagine then I would have it but I'm not positive.

The problem is according to the OS, depending which Im running, the NIC is working fine, but it isn't. So what I did was installed a new one and disabled the old one in Windows. I can't figure out how to do that in RH though. Any ideas?

[do_guh_new]

does it "detect new hardware" on boot? If so then kudzu is installed and will see it. If it does go through "detecting new hardware" thing on boot it should first let you know that your old card is missing and secondly that your new card is in there. Another scenario would be if it goes through "detecting new hardware" notices that your old card is missing and let's you unconfigure it (a one touch operation by the way) but doesnt let you know that your new card is there, then it means it's not seeing it, therefore you would need to find out what what module this cards needs and load the proper module, by the way what kind of card is this anyway?? If your box doesnt go through a "detecting new hardware" a boot time then kudzu isnt installed but is surely on one of your redhat disks and you probaly have it anyway as it installs by default if I remember correctly. good luck

[sharth]

probably new drivers. So it would probably help to know what the names of the new and old nic's were.

And then maybe we can lead another linux user through the kernel rebuild process :) bwahaha.. ermm... yeah.

[Jestah]

Sorry I hadn't replied in a while, I've had a lot of school work going on.

Well the broken NIC is a Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet NIC and the working one is a Linksys LNE100TX(v5) Fast Ethernet Adapter.

[bwkaz]

If you're still using a RedHat standard kernel (if you haven't recompiled your own), then you can probably just modprobe tulip as root, and if it works (doesn't say "module not found" or "cannot find device" or something), the networking should work until you reboot again.

To fix it across reboots, edit /etc/modules.conf and change alias eth0 8139too to alias eth0 tulip

Note that I'm not positive that your Linksys card uses the tulip driver, as the kernel configuration help stuff isn't all that clear (it says "some LinkSys PCI cards", but not which ones), but nothing else mentions Linksys, so go with it and see if it works.

[sharth]

Should be tulip. if it isint, check the linksys website, they are very linux friendly (they give documentatino and what not atleast)

[Jestah]

This might be a really silly question but exactly how do I modprobe tulip?

[nunder]

From the command line, type "modprobe tulip".

[bwkaz]

But make sure you're root first, su - should help with that. You may also need to give the full path to modprobe:

/sbin/modprobe tulip