Hello everyone,

I run a Debian stable server at home with kernel version 2.6.11 which I configured and started almost two years ago. I've barely touched the server for a year.

Last week, one of the two NICs in the machine went completely dead. No LEDs lighting up, nothing. I went out and got a cheapo gigabit NIC to replace it, hoping it would be a simple matter of Plug and Pray to install it - it wasn't. Back when I first started working on this server, I was quite used to working with Linux, but since I haven't had to touch this box in a year my skills have all but disappeared.

So I need your help. I can't log in remotely to the machine right now, so I will be transcribing from the screen onto this laptop I'm currently typing on.

Relevant lspci info:
0000:02:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd: Unknown device 8167 (rev 10)
0000:02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Accton Technology Corporation SMC2-1211TX (rev 10)

The Realtek card is at IRQ 5, the Accton card at IRQ 169.
Dmesg shows that the Accton card is correctly recognized and set up as eth0 using the 8139too module.

My googling has shown that the Realtek card should use the r8169 module, so I modprobe r8169 and find it in lsmod as:
r8169 26316 0
8139too 25952 0

I've added these lines to /etc/modules:
alias eth0 8139too
alias eth1 r8169

But after rebooting, only 8139too shows up in lsmod (and only eth0 in ifconfig -a)

ifup eth1 fails with the error "No such device".

I'm completely stuck! I must have missed something obvious, but I have no idea what it is.

Any and all help is _greatly_ appreciated.

Cheers,
Martin