I have installed Linux 9 (kernel 2.4) on a Dell Poweredge 2450 server. The installation was successful, but the NIC fails on startup. I can activate it manually, and it will act like it is working, but it cannot connect to the network.

I have set up a static IP for the Dell server, and can ping that IP and it's hostname with no problem. The lights seem to be indicating everything is fine on the NIC (green on the left, occasional flashing on the right). I plugged the cable into my laptop to make sure the cable/router connection was fine, and it was.

I'm not sure what to try next. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By "Linux 9" do you mean redhat 9?

Can you post the output of:
ifconfig
route -n

Yes, RH 9

I have a static IP setup on this server.

172.31.100.118 ip
255.255.255.0 mask
172.31.100.1 gateway

4.2.2.4 dns
4.2.2.5 dns

The output of the route -n is

Dest Gateway Genmask
172.31.100.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 eth0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 172.31.100.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 eth0

The ifconfig looks fine. It has two sections, eth0 and lo, and they appear to have the right IP information. I can ping the localhost address, and the static IP 172.31.100.118 with no problem

When I use ifdown, and then ifup, I get the following message,

RNETLINK answers: invalid argument
iptables: Table does not exist (do you need to insmod?)
iptables: No chain/target/match by that name
iptables: Table does not exist (do you need to insmod?)
iptables: No chain/target/match by that name

but the eth0 adapter indicates it was activated.

Try disabling iptables first:
service iptables stop

Done that. I just get the "invalid argument" error, the eth0 is activated, but I can't ping any of the terminals in the network.

There is a known issue with some 3com nic cards...
I had the exact same problem you were having and all I needed to do was disable kudzu.

Apparently Kudzu misconfigured the NIC cards in such a way they are unable to optain valid IP's

Try this..open a terminal and type

chkconfig kudzu off

press enter(it wont display any confirmation message or anything) then restart.

Worked for me. Best of Luck

I turned off Kudzu, stopped the iptables, and did an 'ifup etho0'. I didn't get any errors like before. However, I still can't ping other devices on the network.

I saw some errors in the /var/log/messages file that indicated a possible IRQ problem when running insmod, so I changed the IRQ on the eth0 to 5 to resolve this. I also noticed in the messages file that it gets the same iptable error messages during startup. Other than the iptables messages, there are no errors or warnings in the messages file during startup.

Another link suggested using the mii-tool. When I ran "mii-tool -v", the 'basic status' parameter returned 'no link'. I guess I can try and force a particular protocol with mii-tool, but am not sure which one to choose.

Stupid Stupid Stupid! I decided to open the server and see if there was anything odd about the way the NIC was seated, and found that there were two NICs in the server. I was simply plugging into the wrong one. I had everything setup correctly in the first place, which was what was driving me nuts, but that setup was pointing to a NIC that was not physically connected. Thanks for the help. I did learn a lot about troubleshooting NIC problems though.

It sometimes the simple ones that are the most difficult to spot