Help!!! Ethernet card hell!
Overall, I love Debian as an OS. I've used it many times in a work
environment, and apt-get simply rules. However, I have yet to
successfully install Debian on one of my home machines. Here is the
situation:
I have 5 different ethernet cards without a permanent home: 4 different
Tulip variants, and a Netgear FA311. I'm trying to get these to work on
Debian 2.2r2. I am unable to get 2.2r3 because A) my CDRW on my Windoze
box just died, and B) I can't get this machine to work with any ethernet
card I have, so installing over the network is not an option.
I've tried absolutely everything on the Tulip variants... all versions
of the driver included (ng_tulip, old_tulip, tulip) in various ways.
Most recently, I got one of the variants of the tulip to work by
installing a clean system, and entering the following commands:
insmod tulip
ifconfig eth0 inet 10.1.1.50 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.1.1.255
ifconfig eth0 up
ping 10.1.1.1
And everything worked fine! It was great! So I decided to re-install the
system, and configure everything I wanted. I selected the tulip driver,
and it loaded. I entered the same information above, along with a
default gateway and DNS server address. The install finished, and I
tried to ping the same address. It timed out.
I tried various things, including rmmoding the driver, and insmoding it,
and redoing everything with ifconfig, but nothing works.
I'd like to know what is going on here. I know for the fact the card was
working just a few minutes ago. I also know that all of the cards I have
work well under both Red Hat and Mandrake, which I used prior to Debian
and got sick of.
Also, what driver am I supposed to use for the Netgear FA311? In other
distros, it uses natsemi.o, which is not present in Debian 2.2r2.
Can someone tell me what is going on? Debian is an incredibly robust OS,
but if it can't work with the same ethernet cards that other distros use
with ease, I'm going to have to switch back. I have 4 machines I want to
install Debian on, all of which are currently running Mandrake and have
Tulip cards in them (one of them has 4 such cards and is being used as a
router), and I can't afford to just buy 7 new NICs.
Does anyone have a solution for me?
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