I have an odd situation I was hoping you all could help me with. I had posted this to the wrong forum, where I discovered a noob error.

I have a vmware setup on a server I'm building, and during a shutdown process the system hung and I was forced to power it off. Now neither guest OS (both Debian) has /dev/eth0 or eth1 (board has two NICs) but the driver is loaded in the kernel (pcnet32). The device shows up correctly in dmesg and lsmod, nothing but "lo" shows in ifconfig, and when I try to bring it up using "ifup eth0" I get:

This happens even if I used rmmod and then insmod to reload the driver. I have only had to worry about drivers once before and I'm afraid I don't know what to do at this point.

Please let me know what you need and I'll get you the information as soon as possible. I don't have access to the system all day.

Thanks!

Try using modprobe to load the module, instead of insmod. Insmod works well enough to load a module into the kernel, but it doesn't resolve module dependencies, which modprobe does. If the pcnet32 module has other modules it depends upon, modprobe will load them as well; insmod won't.

Thanks for the reply. I had actually tried modprobe, which had seemed at the time to have no effect, but I will definitely keep that in mind for the next time I have a problem like this.

Turns out I figured out part of the problem late this morning. Turns out the eth0 device refuses to function, but the second nic eth1 does (found this by running, of all things, ifconfig -a. N00b mistake). I have no idea how the second nic showed up, as I only have one nic being shared with the vmware guest OS. I ended up signing up for their paid support.

I have two other OSs where they showed up as eth2. Still no explanation for that. It may be that whenever vmware assigns an interface it provides a fake (guessing here) MAC address. I saw the different MAC addresses somewhere in udev with the eht0 and eht1 names, but I cannot remember where that was now.

For now I'm using eth1 for internet, and I've found out how to make my server work entirely off of eth1 (including 3rd party software). I'll drop a note in here if/when I find out how to get eth0 working again. Sounds like it might require manually editing the vmware files for the guest.

Your problem may be that udev is not allowing the eth0 device to be created because it is restricting the NIC to a certain MAC address. This was happening to me and I found the solution here:

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=255018

Thank you very much parleer, the answer is in your URL.
Thank you again.