Hi,
I am using Potato, and have just migrated from ISDN to cable modem.
For this I had to introduce Ethernet (soft&hardware) and DHCP.
Internet is working again, but only "once". After "ifdown eth0", an
"ifup eth0" only hangs for a while and says "Operation failed". If I
forget to switch the modem on together with the computer (so that it
does not finish initialising before the ifup in the boot script times
out), I cannot get the network to work at all without rebooting.
I hope that is not normal with Ethernet/DHCP! Have I misconfigured
something or am I using something broken? Where should I look? Will
it be the NIC hardware or driver, the dhcp configuration, or even the
modem or the ISP?
I bought a cheap Ethernet card by Corega (which shipped its own driver
named 8139too.c, which I have ignored so far), added a line rtl8139 to
/etc/modules (I am using the driver module binary that came with the
potato kernel) and added a line "iface eth0 inet dhcp" to
/etc/network/interfaces.
I have created a /etc/pump.conf containing
device eth0 {
nodns
}
so I can continue to use my caching nameserver,
and my /etc/resolv.conf again contains just "nameserver 127.0.0.1"
(after it was overwritten once before that last config change).
Everything works fine, but only "once" per boot.
Having to reboot, just to bring an interface down and up may be normal
for MS users (and users "normal" to the modem manufacturer and the
ISP), but with Debian I find that quite embarassing. I hope that is
not normal...
Could it be some boot scripts that come up after networking and that
should be brought down before bouncing the networking? There is no
firewalling preventing the dhcp, but what else could it be?
Thanks.
Marco
