Duel Ethernet card problems?

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Doug Bronson wrote:
> Hi group.
> After coming to the conclusion that IPChains was not going to do what I
> wanted it to do, I decided to not only upgrade to RH 8 (using IPtables)
> but to build a new machine.
> 
> All was going well with the build and OS installation until I shut the
> machine down. Upon boot up only one network card worked (both are the
> same make and model). After some playing around with "netconfig" I got
> the other one working but when I tried to ping the other network (using
> the other card) it had quit working.
> 
> After about 6 hours of messing with it, I gave up and did a full
> reinstall of the OS.
> Once again, all was fine until the first reboot. Then back to the old
> problem.
> 
> I can always get one or the other working. But not both at the same
> time.
> 
> Here is what I have done:
> Swapped cards in the pci slots. 
> Used different pci slots.
> Tried three different cards, one being the onboard device.
> Changed the IRQ's. Both in the bios and os.
> Loaded on an old Caldera Open Linux os. Both cards worked normally. But
> no IPtables.
> 
> What gives?
> 
> Any ideals?

What cards are you using?  The drivers for some NIC cards will only 
support one card in the system at a time, but this is not typically a 
problem with PCI devices (although I've heard reports of it happening).

Assuming the driver is actually loaded and talking to your cards (type 
"ip addr" to see a list of ethernet devices to be sure...you should see 
ethX entries for all installed cards if the driver is loaded, but any 
"unconfigured" interfaces will be missing an IP address), you just need 
to get them configured.  If the ports don't show up in the output of "ip 
addr", you need to verify the proper modules are getting loaded.

Once your cards are recognized, go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ 
and you will find a file named ifcfg-eth0.  In this file are simple 
variable assignments to setup the interface parameters.  Just copy the 
file to ifcfg-eth1 and edit the values as appropriate.  As a reference, 
my static IP for eth0 has the following ifcfg-eth0 file:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=216.171.153.135
NETMASK=255.255.255.192
GATEWAY=216.171.153.129

With this change in place, you can test you handiwork without rebooting 
by running "service network restart".  Re-examine the output of "ip 
addr", and if everything looks OK, you can re-boot to make sure the 
changes "really" stick. :)

> One last question, where the hell is the host name stored?
> There is no /etc/hostname or /etc/HOSTNAME file on the system.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/networking, where you will find a HOSTNAME variable.

NOTE:  The RedHat reference manual (available online if you downloaded 
the CD's) is a good place to find the "RedHat" way of doing the 
configuration thing at a low level, while the customization guide 
generally goes over using the GUI configuration tools.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net