NIC Disappeared
 

I lost my NIC in slack 9.1. It was working perfectly fine for quite a while, I used RH9 for a bit, then booted back into slack only to find my NIC is gone. Ifconfig only displays info on loopback, nothing on eth0 or eth1 (i have two NICs, PCI & Intel onboard). I like to use the 3Com PCI, but neither will work now. Strange thing is I just didn't log into slack in a month or so (I didn't make any hardware changes). Knoppix and RH9 work fine, but slack... no more. I've been researching this for a few hours and have scoured the KDE menus with no success. Reinstalling Slack will fix this, but thats the easy way out. Any sugestions would be much appreciated. I'm not looking for a comprehensive solution, just a direction to research. Thanks!

I'm a newbie, so don't know exactly how much help I will be, but here I go.

Open up a terminal and type ifconfig

Do you see any eth0 and/or eth1 there?

Also, have you tried downloading/installing the driver again?

ifconfig doesn't turn up any info (even explicitly using ifconfig eth0, ifconfig eth1). Slack autodetected the 3Com and Intel drivers fine on installation, so I'm kind of trying to replicate that. Is there a util/config that I'm missing in the menu system?

I'm rather new to linux, so I probably can't be of much more help than those ideas I offered. But just in case, here is how I set my NIC up. My NIC wasn't recognized when I first loaded into linux so I had to go download it. I have an onboard 3Com on my mobo. After extracting the driver and such I just added this line:

insmod /usr/share/3com/3c2000.o

to my rc.local in /etc/rc.d/

I don't know if that's the proper way to get my net working, but it loads the driver at startup each time so no complaints for me. I'm not sure if this is of any help to you or not.

edit: What I'm trying to point out is that I got my driver working for a while too, then I rebooted my machine. When I booted back up, the net was down again. All I had to do was add the insmod line to rc.local file and it runs the driver at start up. It seems maybe this is what is happening to you?