no eth0 in Gentoo although the network card is recognized
 

I recently installed gentoo 2004.0 (kernel 2.6.5) on my machine. Everything worked fine, except, I could not use my ADSL connection, when I booted from the LiveCD.
I didnt bother looking into the problem, but decided to boot into my existing Fedora installation and chrooted into the new gentoo environment. From there everything worked fine, except, when I am once again at the point where I need to set up my internet connection.

I did everything in the handbook, however, when I try to use rp-pppoe to bring up my connection (after running adsl-setup of course), it cannot connect. It says, it timed out.
The relevant part of /var/log/messages is:
I noticed the no such device part and checked the content of /proc/pci:
ifconfig outputs only the lo part.

And now, I am lost. Some more information (might just be the missing piece of information:)):
- Fedora works as I would expect.
- When under Fedora I chroot into gentoo, I can bring up the connection. Plus, then ifconfig gives me eth0, lo and ppp0
- The only idea I have left is that I seem to recall reading linux 2.6 and up would no longer support user mode pppoe. (Is that correct at all?) I cant find that anywhere anymore though. rp-pppoe's documentation only mentions linux 2.4 from all I have read (on their website they dont even mention kernel 2.6 as a possible requirement).

I hope somebody has an idea. I for one am totally lost.

Thanx loads in advance,
- drowstar

Do you have the correct module inserted for your NIC?
Did you bring up the interface using "ifconfig eth0 add.ress.for.eth0"?

I don't know about 2.6 and user mode pppoe, but I know that the rp-pppoe scripts still work under 2.6 (i think they use kernel mode ppp and user mode pppd)

Hi spuzzzzzzz,
thanks a lot for your prompt reply.

Do you have the correct module inserted for your NIC?
I compiled the driver into the kernel. It is recognized, yes.
Did you bring up the interface using "ifconfig eth0 add.ress.for.eth0"?
ifconfig eth0 returns eth0: no such device. Running ifconfig without parameters only returns the lo part.

I don't know about 2.6 and user mode pppoe, but I know that the rp-pppoe scripts still work under 2.6 (i think they use kernel mode ppp and user mode pppd)
Well, then this is probably not the way to go either. I thought so, because it works in both slackware and fedora, running 2.6 kernels. Wasnt sure whether it needed to be configured any special way.

Can you think of a scenario, where the card is recognized, but the interface is not?

Thanks,
- drowstar

normally the interface is created when the module is inserted. Maybe if you compile it in, there is a different step you have to do. Does the card show up if you "cat /proc/interrupts"

Hi spuzzzzzzz,
thank you for your patient help. I appreciate that you are helping me.

I did a cat /proc/interrupts and, honestly, I cant tell you, if it shows up, because I dont understand the output :).
For this reason, I am just going to give you the whole thing. And I really hope, you can make sense of that:
I have no idea what i8042 can be. Could that be it? Sorry for my cluelessness.

Thanks again,
- drowstar

To be honest, I'm not sure what i8042 is but it wouldn't be your network card because that would be called "eth0" in /proc/interrupts. (fwiw, I have i8042 in my /proc/interrupts too, although only one occurrence)

Now check "lsmod" and see if it lists the module for your ethernet card. I think the relevant module it called "tulip" but I may be wrong. If the module is not listed, use "modprobe tulip" to insert it. If that fails for some reason, I probably have the wrong name. In that case, try to find out the chipset for your card. If the modprobe succeeds, try "ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" again.

Hi spuzzzzzzz,
thanks so much for your help.
It is kind of embarassing, but I seem to have solved the problem in a way that was far less complicated than I had imagined.

I still dont quite understand it, but here is the deal:
I used an existing kernel config file that I had used to compile a kernel for slackware (it had worked fine there). I had only one network-card configured in there, so I figured, it would be fine.
Well, turns out, after I activated more drivers, it seems to work now (I am typing this in my new gentoo environment that I already like a heck of a lot more than Fedora). Seems like the tulip driver did the trick. I really dont know why it worked in slackware.

Thanks a lot for your help,
- drowstar