Can't get ethernet port working

Syth

Hi there. I 've just got my brand spanking new PC assembled and I put Fedora Core 2 on it. Unfortunatly I'm having troule with my broadband modem thinge. I'm on IOL's 3 moths free deal, and they provide a broadband modem that has an ethernet socket. I am able to get online with my Red Hat 9 box through the ethernet socket (that's how I'm writing this), but I don't think my PC can see the modem.

In order to get online on RH9, I followed the instructions on this thread, ie I ran netconfig and entered the IP, gateway and mask numbers, I then tried to run service network restart. This is where things went downhill.
I got : "Bringing up interface eth0: 3c501 device eth0 does not seem to to be present, delaying initization" When I did that step in RH9, on my old PC, it was brought up OK. However in the start up sequence for the old girl I get a similar error "Bringing up interface eth0: pcnet_cs device eth0 does not seem to to be present, delaying initization." However, I haven't had a problem getting online with this PC.

For the record the specs are: Fedora Core 2 (got it off the Linux Format Aug 04 cover DVD), which has kernel 2.6.5. The ethernet socket is part of my MSI K8N Neo motherboard, which has a nVIDIA nForce3 250GHz chipset.

nVIDIA have some linux drivers on their website, but I have had trouble installing them, both the tarball, source rpm and binary rpm. I get errors about missing files. Some people at linuxquestions.org think this is because the drivers were designed for 2.4 kernel, and are calling depreciated functions.

But appearantly there's a 3rd party GPL driver out there for nVIDIA stuff called forcedeth, which is included by default on 2.6 kernel, locate forcedeth give me stuff in /lib, so I'm sure I've got it, also modprobe forcedeth doesn't give any errors.

Yet I still can't connect to my modem. If this forcedeth driver should work is there anyway of 'turning it on'? I don't own any other ethernet devices, so is there some other way of checking if my ethernet port is hooked up OK?

Has anyone got IOL's modem to work on FC2? Has anyone got a similiar hardware, and been able to get the ethernet socket to work? Not got it to work? Is ther anything else I should find out?

leeroybrown

This is more than likely because your onboard ethernet chipset is not a 3c501 supported device. Autodetection (is it still kudzu in FC?) probably mistakenly decided to use that driver. Try to find out what chipset you have to determine what driver you should actually be using.

tomk

Yep, 3c501 is irrelevant for your gear - you're on the right track with forcedeth. I don't use it myself, but if you don't get any errors after modprobing it, that's a good sign.

After the modprobe, does anything show up in your ifconfig? Also, have a look in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog to see what happened.

Syth

leeroybrown: Yeah it's still kudzu, but that's all I know about that. I have a nVidia nForce3 250Gb chipset. Appearantly the forcedeth driver should work for that.

tomk: After modprobeing, ifconfig just shows the loopback, no change there. `service network restart` gives the same error, and `ifconfig eth0 up` says more about no such device.

Looking at /var/log/messages I see something interesting. After I `su -` to become root, I tried running `ifconfig eth0 up`. There's a line in /var/log/messages saying something like "modprobe: Error inserting 3c501 ...No such device", so it seems it's still trying to use the 3c501 driver for eth0 (right?). But then I ran `modprobe forcedeth` and /var/log/messages has a line about it, "Reversed enginerred nForce ethernet driver...", so it seems that it was able to install forcedeth OK (right?). After I modprobed forcedeth, I ran `ifconfig eth0 up` and got the same error about no such device, but in /var/log/messages, there is the same line about the 3c501 device not found. This seems to me like it's still trying to use the same old driver (right?).

lynchie

Its trying to use the 3com driver as its picking it up from a config file. Try looking for /etc/modprobe.conf (Assuming its same layout as Mandrake). It may have a line in it such as "alias eth0 3c5xxxx" Replace the 3c5xx with the forcedeth one and try it again

Syth

Its trying to use the 3com driver as its picking it up from a config file. Try looking for /etc/modprobe.conf (Assuming its same layout as Mandrake). It may have a line in it such as "alias eth0 3c5xxxx" Replace the 3c5xx with the forcedeth one and try it again

OK, I did that. It said "alias eth0 5c501" and I changed that to "alias eth0 forcedeth". After a `modprobe forcedeth` I tried `ifconfig`, still only the loopback. In short everything is the same, I still can't get it up and running. Except that `ifup eth0`, `service network restart` and the initial booting sequence say "Bringing up interface eth0: forcedeth device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initilization. [FAILED]" Before that had said 3c501 device eth0... Also the forcdeth module is already in lsmod when I booted up, I didn't have to modprobe it.

Someone here thinks I should have to apply a patch & recompile my kernel to get it to work. I might try that, or if anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.

lynchie

Tis probably not necessary but can you restart your box with the alias line changed, and then check the output of dmesg and /var/log/messages for any indications of module forcedeth loading and picking your eth port. You should see something like forcedeth.c: xxxxxxxx

Syth

I tried restarting, but that hasn't changed anything.
`dmesg | grep forcedeth` => "forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.25."
and `grep -i forcedeth /var/log/messages` gives the same "forcedeth.c: Reversed Engineered ..." and another line about "forcedeth device eth0 does not seem to be present..."

Methinks I'll just try a kernel patch & rebuild. That's the only thing I've heard that I haven't tried yet. If I b0rk my new PC, at least I can reinstall FC2, I've only got it a few days, so it doesn't matter if I have to wipe the hard disk.

Syth

It's OK I got it working. I installed kernel 2.6.7 and patched it with the forcedeth gigabit patch. It's all working now.