NIC installation 1

[dentarthurdent]

I installed Mandrake 8.2 on a desktop machine with a cheap nasty network card in it. In the cards documentation it states that it is Linux friendly from Kernel 2.4 on. The card is not recognised at install and asks for more parameters. I can locate the required object file on the system OK and can install the card manually so it can ping other clients. The problem is that when I reboot the linux box I have to re-install the driver (should that be module ?).
I use the terminal session and the 'Insmod' and 'Ifconfig' commands to kick the card into life.
I know it would be simpler to stick a nice 3com in instead but as a newbie I wouldn't learn much from the experience!
Can anyone help please ?

 

[fluid11]

To make your network settings survive a reboot, add them to the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file. It should look something like this...

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
IPADDR=192.168.1.235
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
ONBOOT=yes

You can set the computers hostname and gateway in the /etc/sysconfig/network file...

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=penguin.domain.com
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1

You also want to change the hostname in the /etc/hosts file where it states the loopback address (127.0.0.1).

I'm not sure about the drivers, but you can try adding the commands to install the card at the end of the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. This file is executed at bootup after all other startup files. This is not the right way to do it, though. I've always used 3Com's so I've never had to do it yet myself. Sorry.


ChrisP
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[dentarthurdent]

Thanks, that worked fine. It would be nice though if Linuxconf allowed the addition of extra modules when configuring the NIC. As far as I'm aware, the modules it offers you are set and can't be added to.

 

[MrTom]

i think the other way is to add the information to your /etc/modules.conf or conf.modules.
this is something i always forget how to do properly but maybe 'depmod -a' may help. it's probably not worth the effort if rc.local script works fine for you