11.4 64Bit Network Problems

English Network/Internet
1

I have been running this system for over a year (it has been upgraded from 10.3 to 11.1, to 11.2, to 11.3, and has been running 11.4 for months).

I shut the system down a few days after applying updates, and went on vacation. I have come back and the system will start up and run. But it will NOT connect to my LAN. The DHCP server recognizes the mac and assigns it the reserved address (DHCP server is also a firewall and is NOT the machine having the problem).

Ok, I have another machine that is running 11.3 64 bit, VMware and W/XP. It also could not get connected when I started it up (again was shutdown before going on vacation). But after going to ifup and making a minor change to eth0 and rebooting, it all started up just fine!!

So I started doing diagnostics on the 11.4 64 bit machine. I went into YAST and changed to ifup. Edited it to IPv4 (it somehow decided on IPv6, just like the 11.3 machine had). Rebooted.

It still has no network connection. I started comparing this laptop (where I am writing this) running 11.4 32 bit and I do not see anything odd (gotta love KVM switches).

After trying a few things, I went into root (logged in) and tried to figure out the problems. Decided to try static IP (since the IP address used is a reserved address, shouldn’t be an issue for the LAN).

DMESG shows that eth0 gets renamed to eth1 (I don’t remember this, and I have seen reference to this behavior in other threads tonight). It also showed the mac address. And that’s about all it shows (besides which driver it is using – RTL8186c / 8111c is the MOBO chip), while:

#hwinfo --netcard | grep -i -e driver

gives:

Driver: “r8169”
Driver Info: #0:
Driver Status: r8169 active
Driver Activation Cmd: “modprobe r8169”

And YAST is showing eth0, RTL-8110SC/8169SC and that it activated during boot.

I am not sure what is the problem. Anyone have any ideas? The last round of updates couldn’t have been the culprit because the 11.3 64 bit system wasn’t updated until I got back, and that was a VMware update. Yet they both would not connect at first, and I still can’t get this 11.4 64 bit to connect.

2

To begin with, you should post computer text (like your hwinfo command and output above) between CODE tags: Posting in Code Tags - A Guide

Then, output from

ifconfig -a

will show if one or more NICs are up and when yes, which IP address they use.

Also you could look in /etc/sysconfig/network in the files which start with the name *igcfg- *how they are configured to be used:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0

and same for eth1 when you think fit.

3

Well, my whole reply went into the bit bucket because I guess I timed out.

First, thank you for the tips. I found the configuration problem – a phantom NIC card which had the same MAC address. Deleted that from the system and then the system monitor started seeing network traffic. But I couldn’t get my browser (FF) to function properly.

Did some more checking and found that the gateway address had been dropped/over-ridden to null. So I manually configured that, and FF was working fine.

I guess I will never know what caused these two systems to change (11.3 64 bit and 11.4 64 bit). And why the 11.4 64 bit came to have a phantom NIC… Cosmic rays I guess.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that one does not want to quote and give the impression what is there is character for character was was output from the commands. My laptop has a faulty display, so I use a KVM switch to swap my monitor between the two machines. And because I had no way (with the network problem) to mount the SAMBA shares… I had to resort to manually copying the output from one computer to the other.

Amazing what happens with a tip and about 4 hours of sleep.

4

Congratulations you worked it out…

In most situations people ae very well able to do copy/paste from a terminal session window into a browserwindow wich shows the input field of these forums.
Or redirect the output of commands to a file on a detachable device (USB-stick) and then bringing it to the system where they go to the forums.

Your situation seems to be an exception and thus you have to make the best of it. ;(
And that could be typing character by character or taking a photo and posting the picture or whatever. In any case our crystal balls are no solution here, because they have allready started their winter hibernation.