[CentOS] how to recreate eth0 - Realtek 8169sc

Mon Jan 10 09:12:52 UTC 2011
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com>

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 10:05 AM, David Sommerseth
<dazo at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On 10/01/11 05:41, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Robert Spangler
>> <mlists at zoominternet.net> wrote:
>>> On Sunday 09 January 2011 13:33, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Our intranet's WAN interface just stopped working yesterday, and I
>>>>  can't figure it out.
>>>
>>> Look in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.  There you should see ifcfg-eth#  If
>>> ifcfg-eth0 isn't there copy ifcfg-eth1 to ifccfg-eth0 and then configure
>>> ifcfg-eth0 to the information needed for your WAN link.
>>>
>>
>> The device file exists, but it's like asif the network card itself
>> doesn't exist.
>
> My immediate hunch is ... and I'm sorry to say it ... but your NIC is
> often referred to as Realcrap NICs - unfortunately that's not without a
> reason.

Thank you for the discrimination, but it's not appreciated. This is
not a multi-million dollar enterprise cluster, so please don't see it
as such. It's an in-house development server and really doesn't
justify thousands of dollars' worth of hardware. The NIC was working
fine for about 2 years now without a hiccup, out of the box when we
first installed CentOS. Something went wrong, I just don't know how to
actually fix it without re-installing CentOS :)


>
> However, check what lspci says.  If you don't see your NIC there, it is
> most likely a hardware issue (or caused by BIOS changes).  If you see
> it, then look closely in dmesg for anything related to loading the
> kernel module for this NIC.  See if that spits out any error messages.
> You may also try to reload your NICs kernel module (modprobe -r <module>
> && modprobe <module>).
>
> Another thing is to figure out what you did before it stopped working.
> If you want to say "I did nothing" and that means you rebooted your box,
> upgraded packages or other things which might sound safe and innocent,
> it might just as well be connected.


The kernel & CentOS itself was upgraded last year sometime, when
CentOS 5.5. was released and it was running fine since then.
I really did nothing. We were working on a client's stuff, in fact,
accessing data over SMB from the server. Would that have caused an
issue? The network just dropped and hooked a KVM onto it to see what's
up. eth0 was still using IP 192.168.1.250 (configured when we
installed it) I then restarted the network scripts
(/etc/init.d/network restart) and eth0 didn't come back up. So, it
could either be a faulty network (yes, expensive card can also fail)
or the driver doesn't load properly anymore. BUT, I don't know where
to start fixing the problem.


>
> The only times I've experienced issues and where I really did nothing,
> it was related to physical hardware issues.  But those times where I did
> "nothing" (rebooting, upgrading, innocent configuration changes) and got
> troubles ... it was always connected to that I did the "nothing" thing.
>  Sometimes even disabling "useless features" in BIOS turned out to
> disable quite a useful feature after all.

So are you saying a spook accessed the BIOS of a machine which was
running for about 3 years, without any hardware changes? I don't,
ever, change BIOS settings once a machine is setup. Why should I?
Besides, the machine doesn't have a monitor or keyboard and I need to
take the one off my desk, walk over to the server room plug it in and
then access it that way. I don't know about you, but I don't do this
randomly every day, it's a waste of time.

>
> So no rock is too small to be turned around now.  Go carefully through
> all your changes you did before it stopped working.
>
>
> kind regards,
>
> David Sommerseth
>
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-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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