Hello!

Me and and a friend is trying to get a realtek 8139 networkcard to work with Linux Debian 2.6.18-4-486 but has problem with it.

We get an error message:

eth0: no such device

We have loaded the 8139too in modules and we can see that it has been loaded using lsmod.

But we can't set it up.

To make things even stranger we have three pc104+, that should be indentical, but it only works on one of the pc104+. We know that our hardware isn't broken because our 2.4 core can set up the network just fine on all of them (however 2.4 isn't supporting the CAN-card that we use, so we cant use it.)

This seems strange because we use the same OS-disc on all three and only one works just fine

Any suggestions would make us happy!

Best regards
Mattias
Leon

Might want to check and make sure the it setup the ethernet as eth0 (obviously eth0 is not set) it is possible its eth1. If that doesn't help need more info, distro( specific), lspci and such

Hya

Check lspci and/or lshw output, then ifconfig. Look for possible clues.

Happy Penguins!

Hello m8's!

We think we have solved it.

The problem was as Hern_28 suggested to check the names on the devices. It showed that they changed names under diffrent pc104+ stations :/

eth0 became eth2 ect.

No clue why but now i have modified a script to check the ames and load em independent on the device name.

Thanks for the help!
Mattias

Glad you got it working

This is an issue with Debian 4.0, and many other linux distributions which use a more modern "udev". One of the things udev tries to do is keep the hardware names for particular pieces of hardware persistent. In particular, the udev rules in a default Debian install try to keep ethernet NIC cards unique and persistent.

Thus, what happens if you swap one ethernet card for another is that it gets assigned to a different device name. Probably, you swapped ethernet cards or computers twice.

You should look at and edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.something. I don't remember the exact name of the file, but it'll start with z25 and end in ...net.???. In this file, you'll see a list of ethernet device names and MAC addresses. Change the entries so that they all point to "eth0".

To me, this is a perfect example of software designed to be "helpful" which in fact is the opposite of helpful. The ONLY situation where I can imagine this "feature" being useful is in some sort of server or router with multiple NICs that often fail or are swapped out. How often is that?

In 99.99% of situations, a computer is only going to have one wired NIC, and you want to assign that card the device name "eth0". In 99.999999% of the times you swap an ethernet card, you want the "new" card to be assigned "eth0" instead of being assigned a new device name.

I don't know how exactly to edit the udev rules to give the desired behavior...I'm sure it's possible, since udev configuration is highly powerful and flexible. I just don't happen to know how to do it.