Hi everyone
My name is Gerard and I am new to linux so please forgive my ignorance as I was brought up on Mac and windows and I may not be in the right area to post this.

My Problem
The motherboard on our Linux based email server recently packed in after 4 years and had to be replaced which has caused the network card to loose its settings and I don't know how to do this in linux as the rest of our network is windows based. I have tried to ping our email server via windows but it times out and I have tried to ping our windows server from the email server but cannot connect. I have checked our router which is a Vigor 2600 and it can see our network and internet but dosn,t see the email server either. The email server has Linux Mandrake 9.0 installed and uses a static IP. I have no problem logging in at root on the linux server and following instructions and am familiar with IP addressing.

Can someone please help

Regards

Gerard

Which Linux Distribution do you use?

I'm sorry I don't know what you mean

Mandrake is a linux distribution.
What is the make / model of the new motherboard?
Integrated or PCI network adpater? Make/model?

If the network adapter is integrated in the motherboard the correct module may not be loading. In theory kudzu (hardware detection utility) if it is running should of recognized a new adapter. However, Mandrake 9.0 is old and probably does not have the driver for the newer network adapter.

The output of the lspci will show what type of network adpater / chipset of the motherboard or installed adapter. The output of the lsmod command will show what modules are being loaded. The output of the ifconfig command will show the network adapter status if the module is loading.

so it's all about this mandrake email server (@michaelk of course I know that this is a distri...) so yes as michaelk said if you are able to login as root on this email server and the new nic is on lom or inserted it will be configured listen on DHCP on default. If it shows up with ifconfig then we can say it starts onboot...so to edit it w/o a gui you should have a look a file called ifcfg-eth0 if its only one card.
and lspci -v gives you a more sorted output.
So do you want to change it to static and you found that file and you won't use a gui then for e.g.

Hi michaelk

In my initial question I had stated that I was using Mandrake 9.0 so I wasn't sure what odcheck meant, sorry.

The motherboard was taken from a server built at the same time but seldom used and is a Gigabyte P4 Titan 533
The network card is just a cheap PCI card I think the make is PTC. I have tried the lspci command but it isn't recognised the ifconfig command shows the following:-

ETH0 Link encap Ethernet
inet addr: (our static IP) Bcast 192.168.0.255 Mask 255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric 1


lo Link encap Local loopback
inet address 127.0.0.1 Mask 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU 16436 mETRIC 1

I hope this helps

Kind regards

Gerard

So it appears that eth0 is working and being assigned the correct IP address.
And pinging the IP address of this server fails?

Have you checked the ethernet cables? are the link lights illuminated on both ends of the cable? Check the output of the command mii-tool. Does it show a good connection? Don't worry yet if the command fails since it does not support all ethernet devices.

I have tried pinging the email server again but it just times out. I have also checked the ethernet cable and it it making a link on both sides. The mii-tool responded with:- eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link OK.

Can you ping any other computer from the email server?
Disabling Plug and Play in the motherboard BIOS configuration sometimes fixes this problem.

No I can't ping any other computer or the router. When the server is booting only one error:-
Modprob: insmod usb-vhci failed.
I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem.

I went into the bios and p&p has only an Auto feature or a number for each slot. The PCI card is in slot 3 should I try moving or changing it?

Try it and see.

I have tried changing the network card but the computer didn't recognise it at all.
I tried using /sbin/ifconfig eth0 inet (static IP) netmask 255.255.255.0 but got a reply that it could not recognise eth0 so I'm back to the drawing board.

Did you change with the same make/model network card?

No it was an Intel board

Hi Michaelk

Thanks for all your help it is now 5.20pm here and I'm supposed to finish at 5.00pm. I will try again tomorrow and maybe get something sorted.

Thanks again

Regards

Gerard