I've got an odd problem. I successfully set up my Thinkpad A21p's 3Com "Hurricane" ethernet card, using a patched 3c59x.o module, and using dhcp. Everything was working fine. Now, all of a sudden, things are just not working right at all.

When I boot or do an /etc/init.d/network restart, it tries to bring up eth0, and I get the message

Bringing up interface eth0: Determining IP information for eth0...Operation failed. [FAILED]

If I do a pump -i eth0, I get Operation Failed.

I am not aware of changing anything between when it worked and now. I have confirmed that the card is ok, because I can boot to Win2k, and the card works fine there.

The ifconfig -a output looks as follows:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:09:94:6B:F2
BROADCAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:91 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:90
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x1800

Does anyone have any ideas on what might be wrong or what I might check?

Thanks,

cyrano

post this msg to LINUX NETWORKING and ur almost guranteed to get replies


m khan

Looks like you are not getting an address from the dhcp server. Try running the network script in debug mode and this will give you a good idea at what is failing.

/etc/init.d

sh -x network restart

This will dump out the contents of the network script and all the variable values as it runs. Once you see the problem you can type in the failing command by hand and figure out the problem.

I'm running RH7.1 as a server on a DHCP network controlled by a Win2K PC that shares a nic to a hub for the server. I was getting the same error:

Bringing up interface eth0: Determing IP address for eth0 operation failed.

I restarted the Win2K PC then restarted the RH Server. RH had no problem determining the network.

Pinged yahoo.com successfully!

I found the problem. It turns out that this is due to a combination of factors:

1) Having win2k & linux dual booted on the same box
2) Needing to use a specific hardware address to get on the network

What was happening is that in order to get on the network, I had to overwrite the MAC addressed used for the card in linux in order to get access to the network on my connection. I can't do this for win2k, so I can only access the network through linux. That's fine.

Problem is, if I boot to win2k, win2k sees the network, tries to connect, can't, and then disables the card. Until I power the unit off completely, that card is disabled and linux can't re-enable it.

So, what I need to do is remove the cable from the card whenever I boot into win2k, and reattach it when booting into linux... or else completely power down the system before going into linux.

I'm getting the MAC address on the connection reassigned to this card, so I won't have to put up with this for long.

Thanks to all that responded.

Keith