Network issues in openSUSE 11.1 on brand new machine

English Network/Internet
#1

I’m having some network issues in openSUSE 11.1 on a brand new desktop. During install I setup NetworManager to handle networks, mostly because this machine has both Gigabit LAN and a B/G/N network card, when openSUSE 11.1 starts it doesn’t seam to start NetworkManager or KNetworkManager (if it helps KDE 4.1 is my desktop). I can start KNetworkManager through the run command but NetworkManager is a bit harder to do I can’t start it by rcnetworkmanager start or chcconfig rcnetworkmanager start, but if I run NetworkManager as root then it starts for that system but still has issues.

The system pulls a correct IP form my DHCP server and DNS seems to be working because when I ping Google it 64.233.169.104 but anything other than that it comes back as Destination Unreachable. Every other system on my network is not having this issue, and when I reboot into windows then the network works there so it is not hardware issue.

Here is my hardware info on my LAN, I have not tested network with my wireless card even though the system sees it out of the box (I have high hopes that it will work out of box as well) NVIDIA nForce 10/100/1000 Networking controller

Now if it is something stupid and small like installing the driver from NVIDIA then I will feel completely dumb, but I am downloading them now so I can take it over to my SUSE boot.

#2

vendion wrote:
> I’m having some network issues in openSUSE 11.1 on a brand new desktop.
> During install I setup NetworManager to handle networks, mostly because
> this machine has both Gigabit LAN and a B/G/N network card, when
> openSUSE 11.1 starts it doesn’t seam to start NetworkManager or
> KNetworkManager (if it helps KDE 4.1 is my desktop). I can start
> KNetworkManager through the run command but NetworkManager is a bit
> harder to do I can’t start it by rcnetworkmanager start or chcconfig
> rcnetworkmanager start, but if I run NetworkManager as root then it
> starts for that system but still has issues.

What method of controlling your network devices is selected in YaST.
If the wireless device was not available during the initial
installation, then the installer will have selected the traditional
“ifup” method. From what you say, you want to control with
NetworkManager. Start YaST => Network Devices => Network Settings. The
place you want to check/change is under the “Global Options” tab.

Larry

#3

During the install it picked up both my LAN and WLAN cards, but it wanted to use the traditional “ifup” method but I told it to use NetworkManager. Looking back at the Network Devices module it seems that my selection during install was not applied, so by switching it over to network manager everything is fine.

#4

I too have a major problem with network access
I have tried two different desktop machines with wired ethernet.
I have tried the opensuse live cd and the full installation dvd.
Neither of them connects to my very simple wired network.I get no network manager plug icon, just a green globe thing that appears to do nothing.
(Both of the machines are 64b, but been installed with the 32b version - is that relevant?)

Help, I have not had problems like this since SuSE 8.1!

spegru

#5

Hi,

I have very similar issues after I installed SuSE 11.1.
I first thought it’s just Konqueror, but Firefox isn’t much better. It’s so bad in fact that I’m writing this on my Windows laptop. On the Linux machine running 11.1 I get a ‘host not found’ about 50% of the time.
I had SuSE 9.3 on the same machine and never had any such issues.
I installed 11.1 from DVD. When I wanted to install additional packages, yast wanted to get them from the internet and failed, over and over again, until I stopped yast. I didn’t change any network-related settings in yast. I use my Linux machine as Samba server and browsing
my Linux directories from my Windows laptop seems to be slower than with 9.3 as well.

The beagle demon is not running.
IPv6 support is on by default. Do I need this? Can this
be the culprit? What else?

Thanks, Stephan

#6

It is possible that IPv6 is effecting your systems. I disabled IPv6 during install but left DHCP in the IP version 4 and 6 option and it works.

#7

What a palaver! Thanks Vendion

Yes it seems the system is set by default to use IPv6 (that’s alphanumeric IP addresses instead of the normal 192.168.1.1 - style numeric ones in IPv4) It’s all very well being up to date but hardly anyone uses IPv6 yet!

I had to set the system to not to use IPv6 from YaST > Network Devices > Network Settings > Global Options, and then reboot. I then had to set network setup method to use network Manager and reboot again to get network manager up.
I then had to click on the network manager and create a new connection (I called it home) and set it to connect automatically - and finally it worked.

No doubt the second stage of changes above was only necessary because IPv6 had been set in the first place

I am amazed Novell let this out. Can you imagine what real newbies would make of that?!?!

Anyway, onwards and upwards…

#8

Glad to hear that you got it working, but I would like to point out that your second reboot, to enable NetworkManager, was unneeded. After you applied the change from the “ifup” method to NetworkManager the YaST module writes the changes to the configs then automatically starts NetworkManager. To save even more time you could have enabled NetworkManager and disabled IPv6 at the same time that way once the system booted back up everything will be taken care of.

#9

Ah yes that’s probably true.

What appalls me about this even more is that IPv6 is also the default for the Live CD - and of course you cannot change it because a reboot is needed and you cant save any settings to a CD!
This really makes the Live CD useless, and because of it, some of the progress linux has made over recent years will be lost to newbies because even a simple thing like opening websites doesn’t work out of the box!

#10

You are always more than welcome to bring this up on the Bugzilla, iirc there is a section for reporting bugs against the Live CDs, or bring it up in the Factory mailing list. I don’t think they will remaster the 11.1 Live CDs because of this but it might be good for 11.2’s release.

#11

Holy cow, what a difference!
I switched off support for IPv6, rebooted, and my network is back to the speed I was used to with SuSE 9.3. Even browsing from my laptop via Samba is faster now.

I didn’t understand the discussion about the Network Manager. All I had to do was switch off support for IPv6.
What for would I need the Network Manager?

Thanks, Stephan

#12

stephanhh wrote:
> Holy cow, what a difference!
> I switched off support for IPv6, rebooted, and my network is back to
> the speed I was used to with SuSE 9.3. Even browsing from my laptop via
> Samba is faster now.
>
> I didn’t understand the discussion about the Network Manager. All I had
> to do was switch off support for IPv6.
> What for would I need the Network Manager?

If you had wireless, then NM is very useful.

Larry

#13

A better way to explain NetworkManager, sorry Larry but I don’t know if that is detailed enough to help, is it is a backend system to manage multiple networks no matter if it is wired or wireless. To use it you would use a tool, for KDE it is Knetworkmanager. If you are not going to me moving your computer around to different networks or don’t have wireless then using NetworkManager is pointless and you might find the traditional “ifup” method better for your situation.

#14

Apologies for posting a ‘me to’ type reply, but I’m having similar problems.

Network is a /27 on 192.168.1.x via NAT router (Linksys). There’s half a dozen machines attached to the net, including a SuSE 11.1 box.

Initially I was allocating a static IP - but after having some problems thought I’d just get the machine up and running via DHCP. The machine is therefore getting an IP address, via DHCP, from 192.168.1.1.

The machine will browse the web, it will ping and traceroute to external websites without any problems. But I cannot get any response from machines on my internal network.

One of my machines, a Windows 2003 server, is running wsus / smb / http, and there’s no response from the browser. I cannot ping any of the internal machines from the SuSE box.

From the Windows side of the network, I see the Samba server via the Workgroup, but cannot expand the server (to view the list of shares on the server). I cannot ping the SuSE machine from Windows.

I cannot ping the very device that is allocating this machine an IP address.

I’ve built a virtualised Win2k3 server (under xen) on this SuSE box and this is running WSUS, IIS, and network shares quite happily.

I’ll provide some additional info. I’ve disabled firewall and AppArmor (as, the machine is intended to host VMs that will connect to the net rather than connect in and of itself), so as far as I can tell it’s not a firewall issue - unless of course I’ve not completely removed it). I’ve also disabled IPv6 on my network adapter (as some users have suggested within this thread).

Could anyone offer any advice as to what I could do to try and locate the source of the problem? Any advice would be gratefully appreciated, and of course I will summarise any steps taken that resolve the issue.

#15

I was having the same problems with SUSE 11.1 but found this (partial) fix online and it at least gives you the ability to browse the list of machines on the network and the ability to ping etc. them by name…

  1. Go to Yast>Firewall>Allowed Services tab - add ‘Netbios Server’ to the allowed services
  2. Go to the Broadcast tab and in the lower panel add your local network address in this form 192.168.10.0/24 - note the fourth triplet is zero. So if your own IP is 123.123.123.1, enter 123.123.123.0/24 here.

Restart Samba or reboot and things will look a bit better. I have just now got to solve the browse of shares on each server. Hope that works for you.
Jonno.

#16

Thanks for the reply. The bad news is that this doesn’t solve my problem.

Firewall wasn’t enabled on the SuSE box. When I re-enable it and look in the ‘Allowed Services’ section for the Internal Zone I see there’s already an exception made for Netbios (I’m not sure why this would affect ICMP though).

Having had a night to sleep on it I’m starting to think it’s a problem with routing tables. I vaguely remember needing to configure them on previous *nix machines I’ve worked with in the past. I’ll read up on this and, should I have any success I’ll report back.

#17

After a bit of digging it seems that routing was the culprit.

There was only the default route pointing to 192.168.1.1 - so that, all traffic for the internal traffic was getting passed across the gateway (and presumably dropped as it’s a private range).

It was fixed by the following:

route add -net 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.224 dev eth0
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 up

Haven’t checked Samba yet, but I can now ping internal machines and browse the Windows web server.

Posting this in case it’s of use for anyone else out there.

#18

I am a newbie. I installed from the live cd. I set my modem up and could connect to my provider but the browsers would not connect. I have tried for a week to connect and was about to uninstall when I read your posts. I unchecked IPv6 and now Iam sending this from SUSE 11.1.
THANK YOU!!

#19

Hello,

Major NOOB here. I just installed OpenSUSE 11.1 from the Live CD, and here is what happened…quite a few errors popped up, but I got it to finally install…on boot up I cannot select anything other than OpenSUSE 11.1…Failsafe Mode is there…but down arrow does nothing.

Anyways…I could not connect to the Internet with my wired connection modem and ethernet card. Then I connected just fine all of a sudden – totally weird…and then it did a BUNCH of updates…and now NO CONNECTION again…I am so sad.

Any ideas? Please help this Major NOOB.

Thanks!

#20

Cannot help it anymore: READ THE MANUAL !! Read the stickies. You could all have solved your problems, or would not have had them if you read, instead of banging the CD/DVD in the drive, boot it and see where it ends…