cable modem w/ pcmcia nic problem
 

I am using a Motorola Surfboard Cable modem with an Epson PCMCIA ni card, I have Mandrake 10.0 installed and I have tried everything I can think of and can not make it connect to the internet.

During boot the eth0 device fails and says something like the device doesnt seem to be present. I have status lights on the side of the card for power and activity, and none of them are on.

ifconfig has the lo device only. not the eth0.

BUT.. The weird thing is...

I have another hard drive with Mandrake 9.2 BETA_1 and Everything works fine.

I edited the Mandrake 10 ifcfg-eth0 file to match that of the 9.2 file, also the modules.conf files in /etc/ are the same, The line in that file reads alias eth0 pcnet_cs.

the ifcfg-eth0 file reads:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=yes
NEEDHOSTNAME=yes


Could it be the difference between the different kernal versions??

Please help..

If your using the 2.6 kernel, check /etc/modprobe.conf and see if your eth0 nic module is set to load at boot. In the 2.6 kernel, modules.conf is replaced by modprobe.conf so that's the one you have to edit. The driver name should be the same in 9.2 and 10. Also verify that the nic module is loaded by running as root:

# lsmod

Which will print out all loaded modules. If it's not loaded, try manually loading it with:

# modprobe <module name>

If it loads succesfully, try bringing up the network with:

# ifup eth0

Still doesnt work..

the /etc/modprobe.conf file has the following line:

alias eth0 pcnet_cs

Which is the same as in modules.conf.

The module pcnet_cs is loaded, but it still says the eth0 device is not present when I run ifup eth0

Would changing to kernel to 2.4 work? Any suggestions?

I am now running mandrake move to connect to internet with no problem.

pcmcia nic cards in mandrake
 

On my laptop, with a wi-fi card, i had to look up what the card told cardctl, then edit /etc/pcmcia/config and add the card to that table, using both it's manfid and mac address, that was all that mandrake needed, it loaded the card and did ./network start eth0, and accessed the network and internet from there. Word of warning, check to ensure you are using a crossover cable to go from the cable modem to your computer, sometimes this is nessacary. Hope this helps.

Well, I finally got it to work.

After trying everything I just decided to re install, this time I tried the 2.4 kernel and it worked, so Ill stick with 2.4.

I learned alot about Linux while I was messing with config files and troubleshooting stuff. So its a good thing.

Happy Linuxing!!