Hello all,

this is my first post here. I have been playing around with Linux for a few years now. I have a dual boot Sony laptop with XP and FC9. its a lot of fun to boot FC and see what people think. I have also installed it for some friends so they could see what it was like.

I was helping someone get a enterprise server running. Everything started pretty well except for the built in network cards. there are two Realtek RTL8111C cards on the motherboard. not a big deal, we built the server and got it up and running with a PCI network card installed a I was able to download the new drivers for the built in cards, I also updated the kernel. now they are able to connect, but only if I boot the server with the cable unplugged. after the server comes up, and I sign on and plug the network cable in everything seems to be fine. but if I boot with the cable in, I can not connect. I can ping its own IP, but nothing else. and if I unplug it, and plug back in that doesn't work either. I feel like i am missing something small, but I am not sure what. I have another issue with the server taking up to 6 minutes to boot, but that is another thing to work on later. if someone could just point me in the right direction, that would be so very helpful.

Hi and welcome to LQ!

There's a couple of things not clear here. Let's get started by clearing them out.

1. What's the distro you are using. Is it Fedora or RHEL or something else? I fet the feeling it's Fedora 9, but it's not clear in the post.
2. You said if you boot with cable plugged in, it can only ping itself. Do you mean to say (or is it) that when this occurs, the machine has a zeroconf IP assigned. Zeroconf assigned IPs are non-routable. Can you verify this? If the machine is assigned an IP in the same range as your LAN (or network segment), you can safely eliminate the zeroconf possibility.
3. How's the interface configured, to use static IP or DHCP? There is a possibility it's having DHCP issues.
4. Check whether the interface is managed by the Network Manager and how. You can verify this by several methods. One is to try the Network Manager applet in the GUI.
5. And finally check why the boot process takes so long. You might get to learn something there. I've seen cases where DNS and DHCP settings caused long boot ups among other things.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Yes, I hope you're not using Fedora on a "enterprise server". How about you tell us distro and kernel level. Also how did you update the kernel ?.
There are lots of (reported) problems with Realtek - yours sounds odd though. What does dmesg show when you (successfully) plug in the LAN cables. The slow bootup is almost certainly DHCP time-out; but that makes it sound like those interfaces are being found, but not connecting.
Again, have a look at dmesg for the boot messages. There might be a driver conflict that requires you to blacklist something - doesn't explain why plugging in later works tho'.

Sorry it took me a while to get back. my dual boot laptop stopped working on the windows side, and I have been trying to fix it. I am so glad I had FC for the other OS.

1. the server I am having issues with is a distro of RHEL I am not sure what version. I am not where the machine is, so I will try to answer everything the best that I can.

2.it is assigned an IP address in the same range as the LAN. when it boots up with the cable in, I can ping its IP address.

3. Static IP.

4. I will check that when I get to the machine on Monday.

the Kernel is 2.6.18-103. I downloaded the package and installed it using RPM. it didn't seem odd or anything.

what does dmesg show? I will run it when I get there on Monday too.

Thank you for some of the ideas. if there is anything else for me to check, please let me know.

Have a look at man dmesg - you need to know about this as a debug tool.
Sounds like modules are loading - let's see what you find.

When you updated the kernel, did it update the modules fro that kernel as well?

Hi Fotoguy, I am not sure if it did or not. how might I check that? I hope to get to this machine today, and try looking at some of the things to see what is going on.

well I am not sure what to think now. there are two of these network cards on this motherboard. and I thought for fun I would see if the other one was doing the same thing. I went into the network set up, activated the second card, setup the IP address. unselected static IP address and deactivated the 1st card. then did /etc/init.d network stop/start. and the 2nd card started to work. then I did a reboot with the cable in, and nothing, just what I thought. so I did another reboot with the cable unplugged, signed in, plugged the network cable in and nothing. did the network stop/start again, still nothing. I had to reconfigure the 1st card again.

I did dmesg and it fills the buffer of the terminal window. and I am not sure what I should be looking for.

The modules, if installed, will be under /lib/modules/"kernel-version"

If they are installed, you may need to update the links for the new modules for them to be loaded during bootup, you can do this via the command line as root, try: