netgrear fa311 driver and installation

Rotwang · 07-06-2006, 03:45 PM

I just installed CentOS 4.3 on a pc that will become a server (so no x).

CentOS doesn't recognize my network card, a netgear FA311. I'm told I need the natsemi driver. Where is that?

If I find that driver, what do I do with it? I'm reading that I have to recompile the kernel?? That sounds very advanced. How do I do that?

Also, how do I get the driver onto the machine? I've got no floppy drive and only a cd-rom.

I tried "modprobe natsemi" and when I run lsmod, it shows up as "natsemi 30497 0"

But when I reboot and run lsmod, it's not there anmore. And I'm still not on the network.

Also, am I going to have to write my own eth:0 or whatever file in network-scripts?

This is so hard.

Brian1 · 07-06-2006, 05:01 PM

Have you checked the HCL section here at the top or to the right. It says mostly using the netsemi driver but one says they are using the tulip driver. May depend on card version.

I would load the module as root ' modprobe netsemi '
Also after issuing the command check the command ' dmesg ' and see if it there is any errors.
Then goto /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and create a file called ifcfg-eth0
Put the following in and change ip and other info based on your network settings.

Code:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
# BROADCAST='tion: --broadcast'
# HWADDR=00:90:F5:0D:2F:85
IPADDR=192.168.1.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
# NETWORK='option: --network'
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1

Or for dhcp connection

Code:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=DHCP
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet

Now as root to bring up the interface run the comand ' /sbin/ifup eth0 ' See if it has errors.

Now if static you need to define nameserver IP in /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Lets see if this gets you going.
Brian1

Rotwang · 07-08-2006, 06:00 PM

It ended up being an irq conflict- I moved the card to a differnt pci slot and it worked. Although, then it stopped working, and started working erratically. I found out that that model of network card has a flaw. There's a patch for it but it might not be for linux... anyway I'm not going to bother, I can get another old network card from somewhere instead. Thanks though,
rw