no eth0 in Gentoo although the network card is recognized

drowstar · 05-03-2004, 02:34 AM

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:

Code:

May  2 23:21:44 drow pppd[3433]: pppd 2.4.1 started by root, uid 0
May  2 23:21:44 drow pppoe[3434]: ioctl(SIOCGIFHWADDR): Session 0: No such device
May  2 23:21:44 drow pppd[3433]: Couldn't get channel number: Input/output error
May  2 23:21:44 drow pppd[3433]: ioctl(PPPIOCGFLAGS): Bad file descriptor
May  2 23:21:44 drow pppd[3433]: Exit.
May  2 23:21:44 drow adsl-connect: ADSL connection lost; attempting re-connection.

I noticed the no such device part and checked the content of /proc/pci:

Code:

  Bus  0, device  14, function  0:
    Ethernet controller: Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX (rev 32).
      IRQ 9.
      Master Capable.  Latency=64.
      I/O at 0xe800 [0xe8ff].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfebffc00 [0xfebffcff].

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

spuzzzzzzz · 05-03-2004, 04:48 AM

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)

drowstar · 05-03-2004, 05:04 AM

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

spuzzzzzzz · 05-03-2004, 06:11 AM

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"

drowstar · 05-03-2004, 07:20 AM

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:

Code:

           CPU0       
  0:      91749          XT-PIC  timer
  1:        224          XT-PIC  i8042
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  7:          0          XT-PIC  parport0
 10:          0          XT-PIC  uhci_hcd
 11:          0          XT-PIC  EMU10K1
 12:         58          XT-PIC  i8042
 14:         21          XT-PIC  ide0
 15:       2333          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0 
ERR:          0

I have no idea what i8042 can be. Could that be it? Sorry for my cluelessness.

Thanks again,
- drowstar

spuzzzzzzz · 05-03-2004, 07:44 AM

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.

drowstar · 05-03-2004, 09:33 AM

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