networking, NIC, kernel

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

Erm, another puzzle for a bear of little brain...

One of our sid boxes has been running kernel 2.2.22 (uname -r says 
'2.2.22-idepci').  It is usually used by various family members for 
internet access (via our little ethernet -> hub -> firewall -> 
adsl-router).  All that works fine, but nfs doesn't.  I finally 
concluded that the problem was the kernel (I was getting 'function not 
implemented' errors when attempting to export fs).  Then I noticed we 
have installed in recent upgrades both 2.4.18-1-k6 and 2.4.25-1-k6. So 
I altered lilo.conf, ran lilo, and rebooted into one these (the result 
is the same for either).  Voila! nfs seems happy.  rpcinfo -p lists the 
expected processes.  But now the NIC is not recognised, so nfs is of 
limited value.  When booting, there is a 'Failed to bring up eth0' 
error, which is repeated if I try to restart networking.  So I can have 
either networking or nfs, but not both, and it depends on which kernel 
I boot.

Where do I begin?

-- 
richard