Hello everyone,

I have had serious problems trying to get Gentoo up and running. I am about to try some other distro but thought I would post here first. Below is a post I made in the Gentoo forums. I go no responses except for the few "I have the same problem." Most of which weren't the same thing. I have also spend a few hours on the Gentoo IRC channel with much help but no progress. Anyway, if you have a idea please let me know!

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I have had an ongoing problem now for a month or more. I debated if I should post here or in networking, but as I am trying to install I thought it might fit here best. My problem is with my network interface. The symptoms are as follows:

• - LiveCD boots and connects to the network perfectly
  - Install goes fine until first boot
  - Upon the first boot the network card module gets loaded without error
  - Eth0 is brought up without error
  - Once logged in ifconfig show eth0 and lo up and running with correct IP addresses
  - route -n shows the correct route and default gate way for the 192.168.0 subnet
  - hostname and domail show correct
  - NOTHING gets out of eth0 at all
  - Pings to internet and intranet all show host unreachable
  - Pings to the broadcast IP or eth0's IP work but TX and RX bytes are still report zero with ifconfig
  - Unloading the module and reloading the module makes no difference

I have done 7 or 8 installs trying to figure out what I have been doing wrong. At first I thought it was a problem with the Marvel 1GB NIC built into my ASUS board. I did a complete new install with the NIC disabled in the BIOS and a Realtech 8193 card installed. Same exact thing. I have tried installs with UDEV (what I would prefer) and DEVFS as well thinking maybe hotplug was doing something strange. I have sniffed the network and verified there is abslolutely nothing talking from this NIC. I have also checked dmesg and mii-tool and /proc/net???? and everything else I can think of but nothing shows any problems. I have even tried 3 or 4 different kernel versions and I don't know how many kernel configurations.

My hardware configuration is as follows:

• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (Barton)
  1GB PC2700 RAM - Kingston / PNY (nothing fancy)
  200GB Segate UATA100 HD
  Nvidia GForce 5200 128MB Graphics
  Network as listed above
  Built in VIA 97 whatever audio.

Please try to help me out. I have been looking forward to getting this new PC and Gentoo (I didn't feel like compiling it on my old 400MHz) up and running for almost a year. Now that I have it I can't do anything with it. If you think you might be able to help feel free to reply or email me at phil41dean AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks for any help and if I have left something out let me know.

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PhilD

P.S. The Gentoo thread can be found HERE!

So, your NIC gets an IP address? How doe sthis computer get to the internet? Is the router allowing the the computer through?

have you:
set the gateway to the Internet to be the ip of the route?
# route add default gw 192.168.0.1
have you added the nameserver to resov.conf?
# echo "nameserver XX.XX.XX.XX" >> /etc/resolv.conf

Hamish

Hey there hamish,

The answer to your questions is 'Yes.' An IP has been assigned and everything has be check, rechecked, rerechecked, rerere... we you get it.

Per a suggestion on the gentoo forums (Finally) I think I may have a IRQ problem. I noticed that the LiveCD used a different IRQ and that the install was trying to share IRQ 3. The last time I booted Knoppix it also configured the NIC for IRQ 3 and it had the same problem. I am hoping to play with this over the weekend and see if it helps.

Suggestions still very much welcome!!

PhilD

Just in case someone else searches the forum and sees this, the problem ended up being an IRQ conflict. To solve it I dorked around in the BIOS to get the NIC moved from IRQ3. I still had to use "noapic" in the kernel line of grub. Not exactly sure why that was required though.

Anyway, after all that it is up and running!

PhilD