i try to explain this in short. i’ve got a SUSE file server. worked fine until about a week ago when i started experiencing problems to connect to the file server so i tried to go through the secure shell. that didn’t work either. at that stage i could ping the DHCP address, got 100% reply but not anymore. i noticed the nic light is orange instead of green. shut the system down and connected a screen, keyboard, etc and started the server. the ifconfig command does not show any ip addresses.i restarted eth0. the dhcp takes a while and gives a message “no ip address yet”.all the other pc’s have no problem with dhcp addresses.i even set a static ip but still no connection.
is this a hardware problem? is there any way to be sure?
Different cards use the blinky lights for different things, but that might mean a problem. No way to know for sure without referring to the NIC manufacturer’s documentation on the card.
shut the system down and connected a screen, keyboard, etc and started the server. the ifconfig command does not show any ip addresses.i restarted eth0. the dhcp takes a while and gives a message “no ip address yet”.all the other pc’s have no problem with dhcp addresses.i even set a static ip but still no connection.
is this a hardware problem? is there any way to be sure?
If you have another NIC that you can stick in there, that’s a good thing to try. You might also want to try another cable, or another port on the switch. You could also use a crossover cable between this server and another PC to test directly.
I do suspect hardware, given what you’ve said. If you were still able to obtain an IP address via DHCP, and to ping, but not to get network access, I’d send you to the Suse firewall.
(Edited) PS - if you’ve assigned a static IP, make sure all of the other network settings are OK – in particular, the netmask. All units on the same network must have the same netmask or ARP won’t work. (Among other things.)
i’ve installed the new network card. set the address to DHCP. the PCI card also can not get an address from the server. i removed the card again and gave the onboard NIC a fixed ip address. for the past two weeks it’s been working great. how can i determine where the problem is?
Heinstein:
Are you trying to run both cards, onboard nic and pci nic, at once. If you have multiple nics running together, they must be on different networks to work.
eg one on 192.168.0.xxx and the other on 192.168.1.xxx
If you don’t have this, you need to disable the one that isn’t being used.
no. when i inserted the pci nic, i unpluggend the network cable from the onboard nic and disabled the onboard nic. i wanted to test whether the problem is with the DHCP server or client.