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nemesis855
02-14-2003, 03:03 PM
Greetings all,
I'm a Linux newbie that's been bitten by the Linux "bug" after many years in the Windoze wars. I recently took the plunge and picked up a copy of SuSE's 8.1 Personal distro. So far I've been unable to make any connection to the internet, hence my plea for help.

Current set-up:
3 machine home network

AMD Athlon+ 1.7GHz 768MB (dual-boot Linux here with Win XP)
E-machine Celeron 566MHz 192MB (Windows ME installed)
AMD Athlon 750MHz 330MB (Windows 98SE installed)

Current network consists of:
A SMC Barricade 7004BR routed to the three machines and hooked to Verizon DSL (configured for PPPoE).
The machine I'm installing linux on has two NICS, a Netgear FA-311 (Realtek8139) and a Siemens SpeedStream[?]. I've "disabled" (there's nothing connected to it) the Siemens in Windows for "future use". This setup has worked relatively smoothly in Windows for the past year or so.

Steps taken so far:
On my linux-to-be machine, I created a test partition to install SuSE. Installation seemed to go flawlessly... all hardware detected. The NICs were assigned "device" names of eth0 for the unused Siemens NIC and eth1 for the Netgear (the one connected to my router). The Barricade works as DHCP server.

Problem:
Upon bootup (and shutdown) the log indicates "could not get a valid interface name" for both NICS. I do seem to have a loopback "interface" however. At this point, opening up Netscape (or Konquerer) leads nowhere. I configured the Netgear (eth1) to automatically get its IP address from the router and entered the name servers provided by Verizon. Incidentally, I got the same result by bypassing the router and connecting the DSL modem directly to my NIC.

At this point, I'm looking for ideas, things to try or any other gems of collective wisdom I can glean here. Linux looks good, but I need internet access to keep it. Thanks.

nemesis855

DMR
02-14-2003, 03:41 PM
For starters, the FA-311 uses a National Semiconductor chipset, not a Realtek chipset. The correct driver/module for the FA-311 is "natsemi.o"; it doesn't use either of the Realtek modules (rtl8139.o or 8139too.o). I don't know what driver the Seimens chip uses.

- Turn off Plug-N-Play support in your BIOS if you haven't already; it can cause resource (IRQ/IO) conflicts under Linux.

- What does the following command yield?:

lspci -vv |grep Ether


- Make sure you don't have an IRQ conflict:

less /proc/interrupts


- Make sure you don't have an I/O address range conflict/overlap:

less /proc/ioports


- If you run ifconfig with the -a option do the cards show up?:

ifconfig -a


- What modules are currently loading?:

lsmod