Mandrake 9.1 eth0 Problem

I have recently installed Mandrake 9.1 on my machine and I seem to have an issue getting eth0 to intialise.

A check in drakeconf say that eth0 is up, that dhcp is assigned and that my gateway is set to the proper IP address. No matter how I try to set up the network connection, I am unable to initalise the connection. Anyone out there ever had the same issue?

I know the card/connection works, since I have a dual-boot machine and everything functions perfectly under XP.

Thanks in advance....
bl

I had that problem but I still don't know how I fixed it.

1) I installed Mandrake 9.1 and everything was fine. Then I decided to buy a new hard drive specifically for Mandrake 9.1

2) I installed Mandrake 9.1 on the new hard drive and the eth0 connection did not work and could not figure out how to get it working

3) I just reinstalled Mandrake 9.1 and all of a sudden the eth0 worked and now my Mandrake 9.1 works perfectly.

So, from my personal experience, which I cannot explain, try reinstalling Mandrake 9.1 while it's fresh. That way, you won't have to backup any important files.

Thanks for the quick reply....

Unfortunately, this was a reinstall - not cool when you have non-repeatable problems....

I would like to hear if anyone has cracked this without a reinstall; otherwise I may not have a choice. Maybe this is an opportunity to try a different distro - no trolling here....

bl

what does ifconfig eth0 say?

What network card are you running? Post it here. Also go to www.google.com/groups and search for '<your network card> linux.'

Does your card have many different kinds of inputs? If so it may be looking for the connection on the cable jack, but you're using the twisted pair ethernet jack, etc. I had a similar problem and this was the reason. Some network cards are 'plug and play', ie Windows plug-n-play capability checks at boot which input jack to use. This doesn't work on Linux for some cards. I had to find a small linux application to configure the card to use the ethernet cable rather than the cable cable.

Is your BIOS set to plug and play? Reboot, then go into BIOS (etc or f2 or something like that during boot). Find 'Plug and play OS'. Make sure it says OFF.

Do ifconfig -A and post the results here.

Yea I am having the same problem, What the hell is the matter with this disto. I bootup knoppix or redhat or xp or slackware..are all ok...I have spent way too much time on this one just to try out Mandrake.....
I am running Mandrake 9.2
system is:
XP Barton 2800+
MSI k7n2 Nvidia Nforce 2 333 fsb
11/2 gigs Corsair xms mem(just boasting a little)
128m Geforce 4 4200 vivo
(that should cover the relevant stuff)
the MSI K7N2 has a on board NIC which shows up under the system config but when I configure it, I go through the setup it shows up but then at the end it says " no ethernet card found," "I cannot install this" gee thanks..I have tried everything I can think of I have downloaded the drivers from NVIDIA with no luck I am new to compiling so I maybe doing it wrong, but highly doubt it...If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it!

ifconfig eth0 shows:

Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:97:91:59:C8
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:545 (545.0.b) TX bytes: 0 (0.0.b)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0xd000

The card is a bog standard 3Com 3c905 100BaseTX

Understand that this worked perfectly under Mandrake 9.0. It is only after the change to 9.1 that the card stopped working. The Mandrake control center shows the card as up and recognizes it, but connecting simply fails.

bl

Did a quick re-install last night - no change. Quite annoying really.

bl

ifconfig eth0 shows: Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:97:91:59:C8 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:545 (545.0.b) TX bytes: 0 (0.0.b) Interrupt:10 Base address:0xd000

this looks to me like dhcpcd is not running or didn't get an address, but normally when it doesn't get an address it lists a bogus 192.168 address.

So first I would su to root and try "ifdown eth0" then "ifup eth0" when you do ifup it should tell you that it's aquiring an ip address. if it doesn't work I would try to manuly load dhcpd with "dhcpcd eth0".

also It could be that Mandrake is installing the wrong driver for your card. do "dmesg" and scroll up and look the line that starts with eth0: compare that with the driver that it installed. for example mine show the following

from dmesg
eth0: OEM i82557/i82558 10/100 Ethernet, 000:59:37:AE:3A, IRQ 11.

in Mandrake control center Drakeconnect shows driver as "eepro100" this is the intel driver. you can manualy install your driver with modprobe. if you post the results here we can help you determine the driver you need to use.

hope this helps
Les

Checked the driver - it's correct. As far as acquiring the IP address, your approach is the as the recommendation that I found on the Mandrake support site. Apparently, this problem is actually rather common - common enough for a response from Mandrake itself anyhow.

Their recommendation is to append

dhcpcd eth0

or

ifup eth0

to the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file.

source: http://www.mandrakeexpert.com/showarchive.php?arc=44039

I'll give it a manual try this evening - then I 'll change rc.local. I'll post the results afterwards.

bl

Alright here's the story and the fix for my post. I should say in advance - this is a totally f*****-up error for a major distro.

Followed all the good advice....

Installed dhcpcd - not part of my initial install for some reason!

Manually ran dhcpcd eth0 - and it assigned the address appropriately - so far so good....

Manually ran ifup eth0 - and got the error

"Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable?"

Check cable???? To make a long story short - the fix to my 9.1 3Com eth0 error was found by some dude (who deserves better credit than this) named Bruno Damour. His solution is described in detail in

http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/ex...2/msg02555.php

The skinny is to add the following line to the ifcfg-eth0 file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts:

MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=1

and to execute

/etc/init.d/network restart.

My network fired up perfectly after that. Hope this helps others and that Mandrake figures out what's up with ifstatus....

I'll post further issues or weirdness as it occurs and I'm sure it will.

bl

I'm having the same problem.