eth0 gone

ptemmerman · 11-11-2008, 01:35 AM

Hi all,

Something really strange happened here.
Yesterday my laptop worked perfectly. Today after booting, my internet does not work.
dhclient returned errors, and ifconfig showed that there was no eth0.
Thought I'd do a /etc/init.d/network restart, but it only restarted lo and vmware8, no eth0 at all.
Then I took a look at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and there was no ifcfg-eth0, just an ifcfg-eth0.bak. I renamed the file to ifcfg-eth0 and retried /etc/init.d/network restart, now getting an error that there was nu such device eth0, wtf?

I really don't know what happened. I'm the only one using this laptop, so it's impossible somebody screwed with it.
Now I booted with my previous kernel and everything is working.
So it makes me think that I screwed up something yesterday with my kernel.
To think of it, I tried to recompile my kernel to get my wireless network card working and to enable NTFS support. Therefor, I downloaded the sources of my current kernel (kernel-2.6.18-92.1.17.el5.src.rpm) and executed the following steps (after installing and uncompressing the sources):

Quote:

cd /home/ptemmerman/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.18/linux-2.6.18.i686
make menuconfig
make all

That's where I stopped, because I got an error during compilation.
For those interested, the error was as follows:

Quote:

815 drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.c: In function ‘prism2_ioctl_giwrange’:
816 drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.c:1098: error: ‘struct iw_range’ has no member named ‘scan_capa’
817 drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.c:1098: error: ‘IW_SCAN_CAPA_ESSID’ undeclared (first use in this function)
818 drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.c:1098: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
819 drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.c:1098: error: for each function it appears in.)
820 make[4]: *** [drivers/net/wireless/hostap/hostap_ioctl.o] Error 1
821 make[3]: *** [drivers/net/wireless/hostap] Error 2
822 make[2]: *** [drivers/net/wireless] Error 2
823 make[1]: *** [drivers/net] Error 2

At no point I did a "make modules_install·, which may have disabled some modules previously enabled.
I don't know what happened, but it's clear that the problem is in the kernel. But that doesn't make sense to me as I booted that same kernel yesterday without problems. What is it that I may have done wrong?

I'm puzzled.

ptemmerman · 11-11-2008, 02:25 AM

Hi guys,

I dug a bit deeper into this, and it seems that most of my modules are gone.

Quote:

[root@localhost ~]# ls /lib/modules/2.6.18-92.1.13.el5/kernel/drivers/
acpi atm bluetooth char crypto edac firmware i2c infiniband isdn md message mmc net pci rtc serial video
ata block cdrom cpufreq dma firewire hwmon ide input leds media misc mtd parport pcmcia scsi usb
[root@localhost ~]# ls /lib/modules/2.6.18-92.1.17.el5/kernel/drivers/
char

As a result, lsmod is only showing the following modules to be loaded:

Quote:

Module Size Used by
vmnet 42668 8
vmmon 106668 0
fglrx 1807720 28
ata_piix 22341 3
libata 143997 1 ata_piix
sd_mod 24897 4
scsi_mod 134605 2 libata,sd_mod
ext3 123593 2
jbd 56553 1 ext3
uhci_hcd 25421 0
ohci_hcd 23261 0
ehci_hcd 33357 0

Seems I figured out the minimum amount of modules required to get a server to boot

Anyway, it definitely seems these modules were removed when trying to recompile my kernel. I would appreciate if somebody could point me out where this could have happened (As I didn't remove them manually).

Thanks.

ugge · 11-28-2008, 03:23 PM

It was a very long time since I tried to compile the kernel, but often the all target of make include all steps. There is a probability that 'make all' even executed 'make modules' and 'make modules_install'