What to do with ethernet drivers
 

I am running RH8, dual booting with XP.

RH did not recognize my Broadcom onboard LAN on installation (I have an Asus P4PE board) but I did find the Broadcom drivers on the CD

So I managed to unpack and make the drivers into a file called bcm5700.o which I can add successfully using the insmod command and can then see when running lsmod.

But my question is, now what? Even after I load the module I still can't see my ethernet card. I think I somehow have to get the module to load automatically on boot, but don't know how...

When the module is loaded, you need to configure your NIC, assign IP and so on. From console, you do this using
ifconfig eth0 your_ip_here
and then you need to configure your routing table. If it's your only interface (no modems, other NICs and so on), you can type:
route del default
route add default eth0
It deletes old default gateway and tells the kernel to send all the packetes via your NIC.

Its actually simpler than that in Redhat.

Try this, run the "netconfig" utility. That will probe all the modules in your modules folder pertaining to NIC's. It wil then allow you to set up the networking parameters. It should also set it up to launch at boot.

Let us know how it works.

Kevin

This worked a treat - thanks a lot.

For future reference, what does the netconfig do to install the card?

I'd really like to understand how Linux assigns drivers to devices to hardware and in what files it records the info. Just so I can troubleshoot more effectively in the future...

but thanks again for the tip...

Everyone wants to be an admin and no one a user!
That will be the downfall of Linux I tell ya!
;)


I imagine netconfig does all of the following:

#checks to see which NIC modules will load
modprobe -t net *

#configures the NIC with an IP and Subnet mask
ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mask yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy

#configures /etc/resolv.conf with the nameserver you provide
echo xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > /etc/resolv.conf

#configures your routing tables with a gateway
route add gw ....

#edits your /etc/modules.conf for driver to load at boot
echo "alias eth0 blah" >> /etc/modules.conf


Some of that is helpful to know... but trust me... in Red Hat, netconfig is the best way to configure you NIC and I have never not seen it not work for a standard setup.