Here's the problem. New woody install, upgraded to 2.4.26. Everything works fine, except I have to run ifconfig eth0 [ip address][netmask address] up followed by route add default gw [address] before I can get out onto my LAN and out onto the internet.

I want the NIC's drivers to load automatically, and not have to run those commands on every reboot.

/etc/modules has an entry for my driver (tulip), but supposedly the bf2.4 kernel natively supports RTL8139 network cards.

/etc/network/interfaces has an entry for auto eth0.

Anybody got any suggestions on how to get this card to be recognized and configured automatically at boot?

in /etc/network/interfaces
should be something like :

auto lo eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.3

man interfaces could help ;-)

HTH

Do modconf from a consol, go down to network card drivers, install the relevant driver. Edit /etc/network/interfaces with the addresses and then do /etc/init.d/networking start. Because you changed kernels and therefore have new modules the driver is not loading.

That was very good information, but unfortunately it didn't work. When I went into modconf it does not list the driver module there. The driver gets loaded with ifconfig because the tulip driver is natively compiled into the bf2.4 kernel.

/etc/network/interfaces looks like this:

# /etc/network/interfaces -- configuration file for ifup(8), ifdown(8)

# The loopback interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The first network card - this entry was created during the Debian installation
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
address 192.168.1.3
netmask 255.0.0.0
gateway 192.168.1.1


But I think you are on the right track to solving my problem, and I suspect it is on account of the new kernel. Any more suggestions that you or anyone else may have are most welcome

A couple of comments;
Have a look at you /var/log/syslog and find out what is happening with the netcard.

You are using dhcp and addresses should not be necessary in /etc/network/interfaces

Your netmask does not look right. I think it should be 255.255.255.0

You were right in your first post. I went down into /usr/src/[kernel source]/drivers/net/tulip and found tulip.o, which I then copied to /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/net. Then ran modconf again and got the error message that it "couldn't find the kernel version the module was compiled for," and "INstallation failed. Depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/net/tulip.o"

So, for whatever reason, it doesn't like that tulip.o, even though it originated and was compiled totally within the installation and upgrade.

My suspicion is that I missed a necessary patch (2.4.18 maybe?). Or is it something else?

Unresolved symbol means that it has detected that the tulip driver is from another kernel version. If you compiled the kernel then you'll have to repeat the compile and either include it in the kernel or tag it as a module.

Okay. I will recompile. See if that helps. But let me ask, if the tulip.o module isn't being loaded, and that's the driver for my NIC, why does the NIC operate if I run ifconfig and route add? The fact that it does operate suggests that the driver is already compiled into the kernel doesn't it?