Network card down???

[ZeeMox]

Linux seems to be able to find eth0, but it says the status is "down". I don't know what this means, but I can't start my connection. It IS a 3com network card, so I would think it's easily detectable. I'm running Mandrake 9.0, by the way. Anyone know what might be the problem? It's my server computer, which ran fine but not quite nice enough on windows, so I moved to linux and all hell broke loose. It would be nice to have my server back up soon :)

[monkeyboi]

use the drake control center to reconfigure the network card...

[ZeeMox]

The control panel is where i got all that information...

[trashthing]

something kinda like this happen to me today. i'm running red hat linux 8. so it's different than mandrake. i'm guessing ur on a network w/ a router. what happen to me is i could only get the mac on the internet. i have only 3 computers on the network. so i tought that was weird. the problem was, somehow my computer's ip switch the static ip to dhcp. i have no idea if this will help. so check if ur ip is on static. if u have a static connection. just check all the IP addresses and dns stuff.

[Thanatos]

I had a similar problem with drake 9.0. If I went into the control center though, it would show status as disconnected, at which point I could click on 'connect' and it would link. I don't remember how I fixed it to permanently stay up, I just kept messing with it until it worked. I think it had to do with me manually configuring the settings in the 'wizard'.

[monkeyboi]

yah in the drake control panel u click on configure your network card again not view info....

[Ddruid]

What are the contents of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0?

One thing to look for is that the variable 'ONBOOT' is equal to yes. If that line is not present perhaps try adding 'ONBOOT=yes' and restart the network or reboot..

[ZeeMox]

Thanks everyone, Imma try some of this out.

[sharth]

well, we could just try this at a command line....

ifup eth0

[ZeeMox]

Ok, I reformatted back to RedHat 8.0 because I like the server features better... but now I find that there is no "ifcfg-eth0" in "network-scripts", and upon trying ifup eth0 at the command line, it says "/sbin/ifup: configuration for eth0 not found."

...sigh. Anyone know what might be wrong? It seems it can't find eth0 at all, but the card worked fine with windows, so I know it's software based.

[sharth]

you probably don't have the card's drivers installed. insmod them or recompile the kernel, I'm not going to step you through that though, its plenty documented on the net.

[Thanatos]

Sharth--kudos to command line :) I run enlightenment on drake 9.0 so I can open more eterm windows. :)

Drake 9.0 and the tulip chipset seem to have problems, even though the chipset is older than dirt.

[sharth]

hehe. cli is fun. no file managers :) xterm all the way.

If mandrake's default kernels are having problem with the tulip module (never used mandrake so i dunno, don't even use tulip anymore.), then goto www.kernel.org, download a kernel, most likely 2.4.20 (heres a link right to that source : ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 ) and go through a kernel re-build. They're not that hard to do, and you'll probably learn something about your computer, and about linux at the same time. :) But then again, mandrake might have some other way around this, I just don't know it :)

[ZeeMox]

Thanks again, I'm gonna try some of this out.

[ZeeMox]

by the way, I'm on redhat 8 now...

[root@localhost 2.2.5-22]# insmod 3c90x.o
3c90x.o: The module you are trying to load (3c90x.o) is compiled with a gcc version 2 compiler, while the kernel you are running is compiled with a gcc version 3 complier. This is known not to work.

Erm, what is this??

[ZeeMox]

I also tried downloading newer drivers and running the compile_UP thingy...

[root@localhost 3c90x-102]# ./compile_UP
./compile_UP: line 1: gcc: command not found

still lost :|

[ZeeMox]

ah, it seems I didn't have gcc installed, duh. I installed it from the redhat disk, but now when i try to run the compile_UP file it gives me so many errors it would be impossible to type them all in here...

what the fark?

[ZeeMox]

Erm, I need help :(

[sharth]

we really cant help unless we know the errors.

copy and paste the errors into a text file, copy it to a floppy, and then run it there. if you need cli commands, ask and you shall recieve.

[ZeeMox]

Alright, how do I copy and paste from a terminal?

[sharth]

heh.

command > file

file contains output of command.

But, for your purposes, that will be useless. In a terminal if you have gpm installed, you will see a cursor (when you move the mouse, one of the blocks will light up) highlight the part you wish to copy.
vim outputfile
hit "i"
middle click on the mouse
hit "esc" and then type ":wq"
mount /dev/fd0 /floppy
cp outputfile /floppy
umount /dev/fd0