Intel GB NIC failing to recognize on boot RHEL 4

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 01:12 -0700, interp01 at sevenbelow.com wrote:
> I am attempting to install RHEL 4 on an IBM T60p laptop and I am getting
> the following NIC failure error when booting or running ifup:
> 
> e1000 device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

Yes, that happens when the driver doesn't load

> I have found several articles on the net that mention the lack of the
> e1000 driver not being aliased in my modprobe.conf file.  I have already
> added an entry as follows to modprobe.conf and manually loaded the module
> using modprobe (neither way made a difference the module seems to load
> perfectly fine):
> 
> alias eth1 e1000
> 
> An lsmod shows the e1000 module loaded:
> 
> e1000                  96429  0

The alias in /etc/modprobe.conf should cause the module to load at boot
time.  If that doesn't happen, then the "modprobe" command does it.

> I have confirmed that the network card does have an entry in the hwconf
> file.  I have tried setting the driver parameter to e1000 but a reboot or
> run of KUDZU will cause the driver parameter to be reset to unknown. 
> Could this be the cause of my problem????

Yes.  It would appear that the version of kudzu you're running doesn't
know what driver is associated with the vendor and product IDs for that
card.  I'd manually load it and make sure you update the system ASAP.
A new version of kudzu may know about it.  If not, squawk it to Red Hat.
You can turn off kudzu if your hardware config doesn't change often
(and on a laptop, it doesn't).  Just "chkconfig --level 2345 kudzu off".

> Here is my hwconf entry for the NIC pre boot or KUDZU run:
> 
> -
> class: NETWORK
> bus: PCI
> detached: 0
> device: eth1
> driver: e1000
> desc: "Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller"
> vendorId: 8086
> deviceId: 109a
> subVendorId: 17aa
> subDeviceId: 2001
> pciType: 1
> pcidom:    0
> pcibus:  2
> pcidev:  0
> pcifn:  0
> -

Looks reasonable.

> Also, I am seeing green lights on both the Laptop NIC and the Switch, and
> the network cable has been tested on other machines and is working :)

Once you've successfully "modprobe"d the e1000 driver, just do an
"ifup eth1" as the root user and it should come alive.

> Im really at an end here so any insight from anyone would be greatly
> appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> DK
> 
> 
> As and FYI here is my ifcfg-eth1 file:
> 
> IPV6INIT=no
> ONBOOT=yes
> USERCTL=no
> PEERDNS=yes
> GATEWAY=192.168.1.2
> TYPE=Ethernet
> DEVICE=eth1
> BOOTPROTO=none
> NETMASK=255.255.255.0
> IPADDR=192.168.1.10

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    First Law of Work:                                              -
-    If you can't get it done in the first 24 hours, work nights.    -
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