My machine deleted the original of this mail so apologies if this screws up the threading.
Wayne Stallwood wrote :- On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 18:02 +0100, CDW (Linux) wrote:
I watched the light on the back of the LAN card and as XP was rebooting, the green LED illuminated. At no time does it do so in Linux.
The link light (if it is a link light but if there is only 1 this is usually the case) operates at the very lowest level, in fact in many cases it will work without an OS being loaded. Until you get that to come on in linux there isn't much point playing with the IP configuration.
Out of interest at the router end do you get a link light for the port the machine is plugged into ?
Nope. I swapped the cables from another machine and the fault went with the cable.
I'd suggest that as rare as it is nowadays, you have a network card that has dubious support in Linux or there is some miss-configuration at the interface level.
Do you know what card (or chipset) it is.
I can find that from Windows which is where I am now and it's reported as Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC. But I also did it from Linux as requested in case it was being mis-described there. It doesn't appear to be as it's shown as :- 02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
You may as well get this from Linux with the lspci command Then while you are there run the following and have a look at the output
sudo mii-tool
The output from that is :- eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth1' failed: Operation not supported
It's possible that the linux driver has miss-negotiated the link speed (everything defaults to auto nowadays, but with certain combinations of cards, cables and hubs/switches/routers you can get a problem)
You could also try forcing the interface down to the lowest level.
sudo mii-tool --force=10baseT-HD
Tried that :- [root@Linux chris]# mii-tool --force=10baseT-HD SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth1' failed: Operation not supported
Hmm. That appears to be trying to configure the firewire card which is eth1.
and to save another boot grep dmesg for things like "thernet" "link" etc and see if there are any relevant error messages.
dmesg | grep "thernet"
(most likely it is Ethernet and not ethernet but by leaving off the E we capture both)
[root@Linux chris]# dmesg | grep "thernet" 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.27 eth1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0)
I do have a firewire card in the machine for video editing but it's been in there for several months and it's only recently that Mandrake started failing to connect so I ruled that out as a cause. I'd be happy to be proved wrong though if it meant that this thing worked ;-)