I have a xircom 10/100 cardbus but eth0 does not appear when i run ifconfig.

I can see the device when i do lspci and I've compiled network device support in to the kernel.


So what gives?

ifconfig only displays NICs that have been configured. lspci shows NICs that have been installed.

You need to configure your eth0 (assuming LFS does eth0 - not sure what LFS is).

On one system I have 4 NICs but only configured 1 so ifconfig shows only eth0 and lo (the loopback which should always be present).

Thanks for the reply. LFS is Linux From Scratch.

How do I configure eth0? I can see the lo interface ok.

(I must say as well that I was doing this on a work laptop so since i'm off for the weekend I won't be able to go back to it until monday.)

lspci shows the devices detected, not the ones that have drivers loaded. Have you compiled the driver inside the kernel or as module? If as module, try to load it manually. If it's in the kernel, look into the logs /var/log/messages and see if there are any related messages from the last boot (I expect an error).

OK eating my words. "ifconfig" by itself only shows active interfaces. "ifconfig -a" should show even the unconfigured interfaces.

Anyway "ifconfig" itself is the utility that will configure the interface manually but that may not survive a reboot.

On RedHat and Fedora the config files that will survive a reboot are in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts (e.g. ifcfg-eth0 for eth0). I don't have this on Debian but I'm using dhcp there so am not sure where one would hardcode the interface. I did find files that contain this information under /sys/class/net/eth1 for my eth1 NIC but am not sure what put that there. It may be ifconfig is sufficient.

Ok, the driver is compiled inside the kernel. I believe xirc2ps_cs is the correct driver, but it doesn't seem to attach itself to my card. How do I get it to do this?

When a driver is compiled inside the kernel, it attaches itself to the device at boot (well, closely to that). In your case it means there had been an attempt, but it has failed for some reason. Your /var/log/messages may have the error message. Do you have any messages from that driver inside?

I found the following lines in /var/log/kern.log

So I guess this is the problem. Will I have to recompile the driver in to the kernel?

-17 is EEXIST, what means that the symbol (a good guess: the module) already exits. I don't know why you get such thing when it'scompiled in the kernel, where should be one copy only, but check carefully if versions of everything fit. It may be a good idea to compile the kernel once again, from fresh sources, install everything and then see if it works - some strange linking between differnet versions of the kernel has a chance to result in such an error.

I recompiled the kernel from fresh sources but I still can't get it to work. There aren't errors relating to the driver in the logs now either.

This is really frustrating, I spent so much time building my LFS system and now I can't get it networked!!

I am now thinking maybe I'll buy a different PCMCIA card but then I am not sure which one will work. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Try compiling the driver as module. See if it changes the behaviour.