Hi

I have just installed Mandrake 9.2 on my pc alongside XP Home, mainly to see how it goes and if Linux is worth the swap. Having gone through the install without a hitch and having enough brief previous experience of Linux to install the extra packages and stuff that I wanted from the CD and make my desktop look about as sexy as a piece of plate glass with a *very* fat backside is ever likely to get, the next task was getting the thing onto the net.

Unfortunately, I'm having a bit of a problem, as you may have guessed...

I live in the UK, and have a home adsl network (ISP PlusNet ) with 3 PCs attached - one running Win95, one Win2kPro and this one running XP Home and now Mandrake 9.2. All the PCs are connected via ethernet to a D-Link 8-port switch, which is then connected to a Zoom X4 ADSL router/modem which plugs into the phone line. None of the Windows boxes have had even the slightest hitch when I've set them up on the network - they can all share files with each other and get on the net quite happily, so I am assuming there is no problem with the setup of my hardware.

As far as I understand it, the X4 router assigns each PC an IP address dynamically via DHCP when they boot up - its own IP is 10.0.0.2 and it assigns addresses from 10.0.0.3 to 10.0.0.14 in what appears to me to be a fairly random fashion.

However, when I tried to set up the network for Linux from the Mandrake Control Centre, I was completely stuck. The wizard correctly surmised that I had an ethernet card (onboard Broadcom NetXtreme 5705K, according to my motherboard manual) and asked me to enter the IP address and subnet, or select automatic config - I selected automatic, assuming the router would assign me an IP next time I booted. I put the IP of the router as the gateway - 10.0.0.2 in the "Configure your internet connection" dialog, applied the settings and rebooted. All to no avail. The Control Centre shows the network connection as "down", and if I try to ping the router or the other PCs it says "Network Unreachable". I briefly had the network connection showing as "up" by entering a static IP, but even then all pings to other machines and the router timed out and said "Destination Host Unreachable", and of course I still couldn't get anywhere near the net. No traffic appeared to be moving through the switch whilst I was doing the pings (ie: no lights flashing).

I have tried to install the latest driver for the ethernet card to see if that would help, but when i came to build the RPM it gave me the error message "Makefile:46 Unable to locate Kernel Source Tree" (it may not have been those exact words), and the same message when I tried instead to compile the source using make.

I'm sure there are some config files somewhere that can be edited, but being a newbie I don't know what they are or where or what to do with them. The manual that came with the X4 has *very* brief instructions on configuring a Red Hat system, but nothing for Mandrake.

Any help would be much appreciated! If you need more info just let me know.

Welcome to LQ.

Try to restart the ethernet device then obtain an IP:
ifdown eth0
ifup eth0
dhclient

Post any output you get.

Here's the results of what you suggested plus a couple of other commands in case they give any more clues:

[root@Andrew root]# ifdown eth0
[root@Andrew root]# ifup eth0
Determining IP information for eth0... done.
[root@Andrew root]# dhclient
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.1rc11
Copyright 1995-2002 Internet Software Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP

Listening on LPF/lo/
Sending on LPF/lo/
Listening on LPF/eth0/00:50:2c:09:49:4a
Sending on LPF/eth0/00:50:2c:09:49:4a
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 20
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
[root@Andrew root]# ping 10.0.0.2
connect: Network is unreachable
[root@Andrew root]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:2C:09:49:4A
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:17 Memory:e7010000-e7020000

eth0:9 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:2C:09:49:4A
inet addr:127.255.255.255 Bcast:127.255.255.255 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Interrupt:17 Memory:e7010000-e7020000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:362 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:362 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:35525 (34.6 Kb) TX bytes:35525 (34.6 Kb)

[root@Andrew root]# dmesg | grep -i eth
Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet Driver bcm5700 with Broadcom NIC Extension (NICE) ver. 6.2.11 (05/16/03)
eth0: Broadcom BCM5705 1000Base-T found at mem e7010000, IRQ 17, node addr 00502c09494a
eth0: Broadcom BCM5705 Integrated Copper transceiver found
eth0: Scatter-gather ON, 64-bit DMA ON, Tx Checksum ON, Rx Checksum ON, 802.1Q VLAN ON, NAPI ON
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is DOWN
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is DOWN
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is DOWN
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is DOWN
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
device eth0 left promiscuous mode
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
device eth0 left promiscuous mode
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is DOWN
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
device eth0 left promiscuous mode
[root@Andrew root]#

It is funny it doesn't pick up an IP.

I assume there are link lights at each end othe cable?

Try it with a fixed IP address and netmask. Copy the netmask as it is on the router and use an unused IP address in your subnet range.

Yep, all the relevant lights are on and green, but they never flicker when I am attempting to communicate (eg with ping or http request). I would take this to mean the pc is still not able to talk to the network in any way, but then I'm far from an expert.

I did as you suggested and set up the machine with a static IP of 10.0.0.10 and subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (which is what is shown on the router).

Mandrake Control Centre now shows the ethernet card as "up", but i still cannot ping the router or access the http interface: pinging produces the "Destination Host Unreachable" message, (which I supose is a slight improvement on "Network unreachable"!) and Mozilla says "The connection was refused when attempting to contact 10.0.0.2" for the http request. Obviously the wider internet is also still unreachable.

Do I have some kind of problem with routing do you think?

Or is it the network card? It appears, superficially at least, to be installed properly, but as I said before, I couldn't install the updated drivers I got from the Broadcom website, for reasons I didn't really comprehend.

Can you ping your own address from yourself - eg:
ping -c 3 10.0.0.10

The light will not flicker unless they are activity lights.

I have the same problem, I can now ping my ISP, I cannot use the config for the router from the Linux box, no prob from the Xp box. I have had to replace the Mandrake shorewall with the 2 interface version from the net, by Tom Eastep. This allowed me to ping through the router. But still no web contact throught the browser.
DHCP is showing a problem that ETH1 is not authoritative whatever that means?
Strangely things seem to change each time I start the box up.
I have managed once to share files with XP but that is no longer possible, I can see the XP box LinNeighbourhood, but it no longer mounts, all very strange.
In a few days I'll be an expert at this rate???????????????????

David

I can ping the linux box from itself as you suggested using the static IP, no problems at all.

I checked what you said about activity lights, and the lights on the switch and on the ethernet card both flicker when there is network traffic under windows, eg web access or ping or tracert, but they never flicker when i attempt any of these in Mandrake.

Just as a double-check, I tried to ping the static linux IP from one of the other windows machine, and it said Request Timed Out.

Try using older driver tg3 instead of bcm5700

alias eth0 tg3 in /etc/modules.conf

Also type the following command and post the output
lspci | grep -i Ethernet

This is to get information on the ethernet card make and model.

There is Linux config info on Appendix C of
Zoom X4 ADSL Modem User Guide

It looks like the problem is with the linux ethernet card driver. Getting the ethernet card make and model you can search web for other linux user's experiences with the card. You should not make any changes on the Zoom modem.

Oops, Ignore my previous post, didn't see the card info already posted.

Try installing not from the .rpm driver software from broadcom, but
from the tar file. This should allow you to build the driver seperate
from the kernel and install it as a loadable module.

1. Create a directory and extract the files:

tar xvzf bcm5700-<version>.tar.gz

2. Build the driver bcm5700.o as a loadable module for the running kernel:

cd src
make

3. Test the driver by loading it:

insmod bcm5700.o

If loading the driver on Red Hat 7.3, 2.1 AS or other newer kernels with the
tg3 driver, refer to the "Removing tg3 Driver" in DISTRIB.TXT before loading
the driver.

4. Install the driver and man page:

make install

Hi

Still no luck!

I tried using the tg3 driver, but the eth0 failed to start (ie: when I did service network restart it said "Bringing up device eth0: FAILED).

When I try installing the new driver from the tar file, I unzipped it fine, and changed to the src directory, but when I ran make I got the following error message:

[root@Andrew src]# make
Makefile:46: *** Linux kernel source tree not found. Stop.
[root@Andrew src]#

P.S. If it helps you any, the exact message when I tried to use the tg3 driver was:
Bringing up interface eth0: tg3 device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization. [FAILED]

check that kernel-source is installed, rpm -qa | grep kernel-source
If it is not installed , then install it.

If it is installed , then check Makefile and search for /usr/src/linux and see what the Makefile is looking for.

Hope this helps.