Very Computer

Please HELP!

I have an ne2000 clone that had been working wonderfully until yesterday.
It has suddenly been rendered undetectable at boot.  I have Win95 on another
partition, and the card still works fine there.  My Linux is Caldera
OpenLinux Lite 1.1:  a 2.0.29 kernel.

The Ethernet HOWTO suggested I pass LILO some boot line parameters, which
I did (ether=12,0x300,eth0), but that had no effect.  The same boot
messages appear as before. They are:

[snip]
Mounting local filesystems...
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
SIOCSIFADDR: no such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: no such device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: no such device
SIOCADDRT: no such device
Mounting remote filesystems...
[snip]

This happened once a few months back.  I re-installed Caldera 1.1 to get
the card back, but I lost a lot of work :-<

If anyone has suggestions for recovering the use of my NIC without
reinstalling, I'd appreciate it.  Many thanks.

--
+------------------+
Terrence  Branscombe

Don't ask me why this worked, but it did.  After trying to load the ne.o
module with modprobe, I received some error messages that said the symbols
in my ne.o module did not match my kernel(?).  Quite a mystery, since I
had neither upgraded my kernel nor modified the ne.o before my network
card became undetectable.  Anyway, the message implied that the only way
to know if the ne.o module was corrupt was to reinstall it from, in my
case, CDROM.

It was quite a scary move, since to do so I had to remove the linux
binaries while my system was still running.  I used LISA to do so.  I then
reinstalled from the RPM on the CD and rebooted.  Voila!  Back in
business, and astounded that one can remove the kernel and several modules
while the system is running!  Can NT do that?

:-))))

: [snip]
: Mounting local filesystems...
: /proc on /proc type proc (rw)
: SIOCSIFADDR: no such device
: SIOCSIFNETMASK: no such device
: SIOCSIFBRDADDR: no such device
: SIOCADDRT: no such device
: Mounting remote filesystems...
: [snip]

Just another note.  These messages are the same as those generated by
ifconfig.  For some reason, Linux can no longer detect the eth0 device,
while Win95 on the same machine still can.

--
+------------------+
Terrence  Branscombe

I haven't seen your earlier posts so forgive me if I don't understand the
problem.

It looks like you've recompiled your kernel and either the linkup between
depmod,modprobe has gone awry or you haven't compiled enable loadable module
support and kernel module loader (kerneld) kerneld into your new kernel.

Try
1) modprobe eth0 - if this works (your ip address and routing tables won't
be setup) , then your either your startup routines are not correct (checkout
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit for redhat 5.x) or you dont have kernel module loader
compiled in. (for redhat 5.2 make sure that you $ cat /proc/version
/lib/modules/2.x.y/.rhkmvtag - this will ensure that rc.sysinit will find
the correct set of modules when it does the depmod -a )

2) it 1) fails try insmod /lib/modules/2.x.y/net/ne.o where 2.x.y is your
current kernel
If this fails you haven't enabled loadable module support or your kernel
compile was not a success. if it works, you probabll have depmod,modprobe
confusion

Good Luck - hope this helps
Terry East