I had to change out my nic card. Now the system won't automatically bring up the network. It sees the new card but does not give it an inet address.

I can hack it and get it to work ( edit /etc/iftab, put in an entry eth2 for my new card - but then at boot up, I have to manually add an ifdown eth2; ifup eth2 to get it to work - ifdown needed because something thinks its up when it's not).

I also put an entry into /etc/network/interfaces. But something seems to think that my interface is already up and so doesn't bring it up further.

So, what is the "correct" way to change your nic card.


thanks

Did you have it in auto mode in interfaces? Please post the relevant section.

I've done some experimenting. I'm almost there. Just won't come up automatically!

1. I got rid of eth2 and just changed the mac addr for eth0 in iftab - see below.

2. When I log in, the little icon at the top right next to the time, says, no network connection. If I right click it, there's a check mark next to enable networking.

3. If I left click it, theres now a radio button on wired network that is not set. If I select this, it will now bring up the network properly.


So.... why won't it bring this up automatically?

!!! one strange thing !!! Each time I check/uncheck my wired connection from the gui, it modifies network/interfaces and moves the line "auto eth0" from before the iface eth0 line and puts it at the end of the file. Either way does not work however.



--------------------------------------------
From /var/log/dmesg:

[ 25.130393] eth0: RealTek RTL-8029 found at 0xd000, IRQ 11, 00:50:BA:F3:C2: D5.

--------------------------------------------

$ cat iftab
# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.
# See iftab(5) for syntax.

#eth0 mac 00:02:e3:10:dd:e3 arp 1
eth0 mac 00:50:ba:f3:c2:d5 arp 1
--------------------------------------------

$ cat interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

Looks like the problem was the dylink nic card I was using. It's apparently very old and probably there's a driver problem.

When I removed it and enabled the on-board lan, everything worked using the via-rhine driver. I didn't need to modify anything in iftab or anywhere else.