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| root wrote in a message to Mike Bilow: Hmmm ... No, it was to discuss at blu.org, not to Mike. But maybe I can get the goofy mailer to correctly identify me this time. (But then there's a guy I'm working for now at Digital - oops, I meant Compaq - whose email usually goes out identified as having come from firstname.lastname at localhost.zko.dec.com. ;-) | You have me completely mystified. I have no idea what the "control | panel" is -- at least not in Linux. Usually, configuration of | network hardware is done through the command line. That's funny; every linux system I've ever used (not all that many, but several different releases) have had a program called control-panel, which is a GUI for doing assorted superuserish things to the system. The FAQs and HOWTOs that I've been reading all like to suggest this as the best way to configure your system. Are we perhaps talking about different systems, both called "linux"? | ... In "/etc/modules.conf", you will find a mapping | of device names such as "eth0" and "eth1" to the appropriate network driver | module. If you edit this file, you will need to run "depmod -a" to rebuild the | module dependency and other information, and then you will need to restart the | running kerneld instance by sending it a "-HUP" signal. If you didn't follow | this, have a look through the Modules HOWTO. Hmmm again. This system (Redhat 5.1) has no file by that name. I tried the command find / -name '*modules.conf*' -print and it finds no files whatsoever. I even have my old system mounted so I can compare files, and it had no such file name, either. I also grep modules.conf /usr/doc/HOWTO/* This directory has 31Mbytes of data, and there was only one match, in the Busmouse document. Are we in the same universe? | By default, if there is no mapping, then kerneld will assume that the name of | the module is the same as the name of the device, which is why you are getting | the particular message you are getting. I just checked with "man kerneld", and its man page lists no files that it reads. In fact, the page doesn't contain the string "file" in any capitalization. So it appears that this kerneld doesn't read from any files (or it does and the fact isn't documented). | Technically, interfaces are "attached." You don't create hardware with | software. The "ifconfig" command performs the attachment. It does this by | making a request into the kernel, which transmits that request to kerneld to | try and load the driver module. In turn, kerneld tries to run "modprobe", | which relies on the tables generated by "depmod", which originates back at | "/etc/modules.conf". Hmmm yet again. Sounds like confused terminology. It seems to me that interface names like "eth0" don't refer to hardware, but rather to software, in particular to kernel data structures. After all, "lo0" is an interface name, and it clearly doesn't refer to hardware, but just to a software object in the kernel. Granted, "eth0" does refer to hardware in some sense, though, which is why I'd call it confused. In any case, "ifconfig eth1 up" is what the ifconfig man page says attaches interfaces, but this doesn't work: : ifconfig eth1 up : echo $? 255 : ifconfig eth1 eth1: unknown interface. : So however eth1 is supposed to come into existence, this isn't it. One mystery so far is just who creates (or attaches or activates) the lo0 and eth0 interfaces. They seem to just appear "as if by magic", but whoever does the job doesn't make eth1 exist. In my experience, this is always a bit of black magic that is different on every Unix system that I've ever seen. | You can bypass this process with the "insmod" command which simply forces a | particular driver to be loaded, specified by filename. Of course, this can | also crash your machine pretty quickly, but it is useful for testing. Unless | you have a good reason for doing otherwise, "modprobe" should be used. Hmmm ... I read "man insmod" and tried running it a few times. The new card is a 3Com 3c509b, and there is a 3c509.o module that might work. But whenever I run insmod, it just tells me: /lib/.../3c509.o: init_module: Device or resource busy It's not obvious what this might mean. How can the device (or resource) be busy if it's not even loaded? | You have a simple problem. Your automated installation just did not | handle two network cards, so you have to patch it up manually. Probably. I just have to figure out what to type. And of course there's always the danger of totally killing the system if I do it wrong (which is highly likely, since this is a new system full of mystery, so I'm once again just a bumbling novice at it all. But if I wait until I understand it all, I'll die of old age first ... ;-) (I've already done things a couple of times that seemed to tuen the system into a near-total zombie, and had to resort to rebooting my old linux, zapping the new partition, and installing from scratch. It seems somewhat fragile.)
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