A very wierd situation;

I cheated in an attempt to connect my card to the net. I used the gui tool network devices in conjunction with configuring my router on another computer to statically set the ip address of my linux box. After this worked, I changed both back to dhcp and my linux box finally got connected to the net. But here is the wierd part. I restarted my machine and lo and behold the ethernet port is down again??? I think i am having a problem with dhcp, for some reason my card isnt getting the right info from my router. Anyone with ideas, suggestions??

Firewall/NAT on the router blocking your NIC?

Just a suggestion, I setup my router to recognise my network card mac address (gleaned from the output of "ifconfig") and always assign it a fixed ip. I have entries in /etc/hosts thus:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost shangrila
192.168.0.1 shangrila.brazil.org shangrila #<- this ip address being taken from ifconfig (example only)

As I understand it, the router has a dhcp client inside it which gets its ip from my isp, inside the router is also a dhcp server which dishes out ip addresses to any computers connected to it. My computer therefore is still using dhcp to get its ip from my router, I have just set it so that for each mac address connected it will always give the same ip.

I am still learning as you can tell but... this works for me... so far!

hi again;

once again motub and tuttle thanks for all your help, it is greatly appreciated.
As for a firewall, I dont think I set mine up. My nic used to work and inbetween the time that it did work and it didnt all I did was build the kernel (many many many many times ). Do you think that somewhere in building the kernel I could have enabled the firewall? Do you know of an easy way to check and/or fix this? I dont need a firewall on my linux box cause its on an internal network and is being protected from the outside by my router's firewall.

As for statically setting my IP address I did as u suggested tuttle and it worked, but I kinda want to know the reason my nic isnt getting its IP address from the DHCP service on my router (it used to, I swear ) If my nic doesnt get its address from the router dynamically it will have won the battle that I fought for so long

Thanks for all your help once again guys, your knowledge and support are much appreciated.

First of all - no worries!
A firewall in linux is setup using iptables (you probably already have it). You can use iptables manually or use a program to control it for you. I use arnos' iptables firewall script to secure my computer. I found it via this webite which has proved invaluable for me for all things linux. If you scroll down and have a look at the "securing linux"->"using iptables" and have a read, it's very simply put and you will have a really effective and configurable firewall up and running within an hour. This will be far more effective than the internal "firewall" in your router (unless you have a proper (expensive) hardware firewall!).

edit: you will also need to check you have enabled "iptables" in your kernel!

tuttle;

I know that iptables is one of the options that gets initiated on my linux system startup. Do you think I should disable iptables from starting up to see if my nic will work?

Thanks alot, all help is much appreciated

good plan, try it and see. Lets face it, as long as you are running linux behind a router you are practically bullet proof! (as long as the basics are true ie. you are not logged in as root etc..)

lol, i always log in as root, buts its ok its a junk machine that contains no sensitive data, chances are if it gets a virus (if any exist for linux ill just format the hard drive). Anyways thx for the iptables tip, i cant try it just yet (im at work ) but I will when i get home.

Thx alot!

tuttle;

I appreciate the help but disabling iptables did not work. I changed my default runlevel to 5 and changed S05iptables in my rc5.d directory to .S05iptables, effectively making it invisible to rc (it does not begin w/ 'S'). I do really appreciate the help though. Do you (or anyone else for that matter) have any idea howto solve my problem?

I ran a dmesg and noted the following lines:

Concerning my power management options:
"ACPI disbles because your bios is from 199 and too old"
"local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling"
"Found and enabled local APIC"
...
"apm: BIOS not found"
(I dont know what APIC is but it sounds related)
Dmesg suggested that if I wanted to load acpi do a ACPI=force on boot time, so thats what I will try next

As for my ethernet card problem it seems that the card is brought up just fine:
"eth1: 3c5x9 at 0x220, 10baseT port, address <mac address is here>, IRQ 5."
"eth1: Setting 3c5x9/3c5x9b half-duplex mode if_port: 0, sw_info: 1321"
"eth1: setting Rx mode to 1 address"

I dont know if any of this is bad or not, any takers???

On a side not i tried disabling kudzu as several posts suggested, but doing so has not impact on my card, it still will not connect.

Thx;
Movitto

Yay I solved my power issue!!!!!!!

By appending acpi=force onto the boot parameter at the boot prompt I forced acpi to start which then shutoff my system when I ran shutdown -h

Now the only two problems are:

1) my ethernet card is being detected as a valid device by the system but cannot connect to network, I think this is caused by my routers dhcp server not working with my linux box (and I dont want to set it statically )

2) automount will startup on system start, but on shutdown automount will not shutdown on its own.

Thx

What do you think;

I was searching around trying to solve my ethernet card problem when i came across dhclient, a utility to configure a dhcp client to contact a dhcp server to get ip info. It sounded like exactly what i needed, I went to /sbin and ran dhclient but the following lines were ouput amist the introduction screen before the program quit:

"socket protocal not available - make sure CONFIG_PACKET and CONFIG_FILTER are enabled in your kernel configuration"
I think this may be the solution to my problem. My last kernel build was quite sloppy and I rushed through it to enable some things to see if they would solve some problems. I will do another kernel build and go more slowly this time, reading each option. If anyone has anything to say on this please do so, no one but me has posted in this thread in a while

Thx everyone!

Hurray!!!!!!!!!!! I figured out why my ethernet card is not being assigned an ip address and fixed it.

I was looking into the program DHClient that contacts a dhcp server and gets assigned an ip address from it when the error popped up that it needs certain variables enabled by kernel paramaters to work properly. (forgot variables, not important right now). So I went into my kernel config and lo and behold Socket filtering was not loaded (dhcp needs this and packet socket). Also this time around I let my ethernet card driver be a module. After compilation and such, I restarted and after a few suspensefull seconds the card status turned green. I even ftp'd to ftp.kernel.org.

Of course now x isnt working, 10 seconds in I get an error message, but thats alright, it has worked in the past so now I just have to see what I changed and fix it (of course nothing is as simple as it seems and I will probably be posting more posts.... alot more posts). Also in addition to automount some other programs are not resisting to be terminated at system shutdown, these programs are:
automount, xfs, ans sm_client.

I'll look into these tmmrw.

Once again if any one has any comments, ideas, suggestions or such feel free to post, I am up for anything, and a big thanks to all that have helped me so far....

Almost there

one quick note: those variables mentioned in the previous post are CONFIG_PACKET and CONFIG_FILTER which are turned on by enabling packet socket and socket filtering in the kernel config respectively.

Hope this helps

sorry, been at work. well done for all that stuff, got to go out now, bbl.
If no-one posts for a few hours it's probably because they are on the other side of the planet!