Hi,

This is my first post. I’m a relative newbie to Linux, having recently set up a workstation in our small office. I’ve learned most things I need by googling and reading forum posts – now I have a problem I can’t solve and wondered if anyone can help.

Problem
I can’t set up a network connection. I've tried a number of network cards and I can get an eth0 device set up with a Hwaddr but I can't get the NIC fully configured to connect to our network/the internet.

Setup
I’m using SuSE 9.3 64-bit. It’s old I know, but we have to use this to run a specific piece of software (which requires the specific gcc and/or glibc libraries from this distro).

The system is an IBM Z-Pro (Xeon workstation) and I’ve got everything working fine apart from the network connection.

We have an office network with a DHCP server. In YaST, Network Card Configuration, Network Address Setup, I've got "Automatic Address Setup (via DHCP)" selected.

What I’ve tried
I’ve tried the onboard LAN – caused machine to crash during configuration so I disabled it in BIOS and put in a PCI network card.

First card I tried was a Netgear FA311v2 (just what was available in the shop) – Configured it in YaST and it chose the module “8139too” and all looked well. However, if I look in DeviceManager, Network Controller, Details it says “Available Yes, Configured No”.

ifconfig gives me this:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1B:2F:28:4D:CE
inet6 addr: fe80::21b:2fff:fe28:4dce/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:676 (676.0 b)
Interrupt:193 Base address:0x6000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:376 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:376 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:26231 (25.6 Kb) TX bytes:26231 (25.6 Kb)

I can’t ping anything in the outside world; ping <address> returns “connect: Network is unreachable”.

Having read that there may be problems with the Realtek 8139 chip in this NIC in Linux, I also got an Intel Pro/1000 GT (chosen after a bit more reading since the required module “e1000” also seemed to be natively in the kernel). Unfortunately this gave me the exact same results as the Netgear card.

I know the cards are OK because I’ve tried them all (including onboard LAN) on the same machine with Windows (I’m not dual-booting but I have a separate hdd with XP for this machine also).

If anyone knows how to solve this problem for my SuSE 9.3 installation I'd be very grateful as we'd really like to get this machine networked! I'll be happy to post any more info you may require.

Cheers,

Chris

MY ethernet card is a Belkin also when I use suse 9.3 To my knowledge the chip set is Realtek
Try to configure PPP over ethernet IP address dynamic


all the best

I assume you have suse to use dhcp to get an ip address.

Have you tried to reset the router/switch which act's as an dhcp server.

Thanks for the replies. Yes, I've got "Automatic Address Setup (via DHCP)" selected. The switch seems to be working fine. In fact I actually installed SLES 10 (SuSE linux enterprise server 10) on a spare hdd last night to double-check the hardware. I can connect no problem with that using the on-board LAN but the Netgear (Realtek chipset) card gives the same errors (from what I've read this card, FA311v2 has a 8139D revision of the chipset and that's what may be causing problems). I haven't tried the Intel one in SLES 10 yet

Anyway, this makes me think that I may just have been unlucky with both choices of network card (and the onboard) for SuSE 9.3

So... can anyone recommend a specific wired ethernet card that they know to work out-of-the-box in SuSE 9.3 (the x86_64 distro ideally)? (This info seems hard to come by via google - just lots of articles about the ones which don't work lol). What's your Belkin, ronlau9? Maybe I need one from the right "era" - if anyone can let me know an exact model number I'm straight to the auction site ;-)

Thanks for your help

This is the official hcl list

http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_%28Wired%29