Re: VA box network install challenge

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Reposting to Debian-User, so that you can get suggestions from others 
that might be more knowledgeable than me, and so that people having the 
same issue in the future might benefit from this discussion being archived.

See below for more info:


Danny O'Brien wrote:

> Thanks for your helpful response. My original post is below.
>
> Here's some output from the different troubleshooting attempts.
>
> - /etc/init.d/networking stop -- resulted in this: "SIOCDELRT: No such 
> device"
>
> - running "mii-tool" as root resulted in this: "No MII interfaces found"
>
> - bringing up interface manually with ifup eth0 gave this: "interface 
> already configured"
>
> - I rebooted the box, paying careful attention to the bootup output, 
> and saw "SIOCDBCAST: No such device" flash by.
>
> So although the Debian installer saw the card and installed the 
> eepro100 driver, some part of the operating system appears not to see 
> the network hardware.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> I'm thinking that Debian is not happy with the VA/Intel ethernet chip 
> set. At this point, I'm going to try installing a 3Com PCI network 
> card in the box, to see if the OS sees that.

I suspect you're running a 2.2 kernel ("uname -a" will show you the 
kernel version you have), and it may be having trouble with that 
chipset. What does "lspci" say about the ethernet stuff?

You might want to upgrade to a 2.4 kernel. Try "apt-get search 
kernel-image-2.4" to see the different 2.4 kernels available on your CD, 
then install one with a command like "apt-get install 
kernel-image-2.4.22-1-k7", or whatever version matches your CPU(s).

--
Kent