[PLUG] Debian Network Problem

Derek Loree drl at drloree.com
Fri Jun 13 11:18:11 UTC 2003


On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 07:58, Jason Van Cleve wrote:
> Always wanted to try gentoo.  Looks cool.  So I did, just now, and it,
> too, fails to connect to the 'Net:  and it uses dhcpcd instead of
> dhclient. Now I'm scritchin' my head again, because I've tried two
> different NICs and every combination of options to dhcpcd.  Tried
> sending the host name, the MAC address, everything I could find on
> google.

What are the chipsets on the NIC's you have tried?
> 
> I noticed the dhcpcd process IDs keep changing rapidly, until they
> finally die out altogether.  I don't know if that's how it's supposed to
> work, but then I checked the syslog (the "everything" log, in
> gentooland), and I saw a whole lot of these messages (I'm guessing one
> for every process):
> 
> [dhcpcd] dhcpStop: ioctl SIOCSIFADDR: Bad file descriptor
> [dhcpcd] dhcpStop: ioctl SIOCSIFFLAGS: Bad file descriptor

This is acting like the interface isn't connected to the cable, or the
cable is bad or the hub is bad, or something along those lines.
> 
> I don't suppose anyone can explain that, because google produced nothing
> useful.  Maybe my motherboard is fscked, or maybe it's a memory problem.
> At one point I was getting outa memory errors.  (Sure could use a
> descriptive error message once in a while. . . .)  Mr. Chorman, do you
> know how I can set up a swap partition after booting from the gentoo CD?
>  Maybe that would help.
> 
> It seems Win98 is the only OS this machine is capable of running.

Success in getting an IP address is not a good criteria for deciding if
an OS is compatible with the hardware.  At most it lets you know that
the NIC you've got isn't compatible.  However, it could also be pointing
to hardware problems elsewhere on your network.

If you have a bad hub, or an incorrectly wired cable, then the slower
than a dog WinIP stack still might function, but even slower than
usual.  The nice fast linux stack will still work, just not well.

This is looking more like a hardware problem than a distribution
problem.

I've installed the Debian Net Install on a fair number of machines, and
only once did I have to change the dhcp client, and that was back when
Woody was still unstable.

Good Luck,

Derek Loree






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