Slackware 12.0 on an HP Pavilion POS
Longfellow
Hadda get my wife a better rig and I was too busy to do the right thing,
so I bought an HP Pavilion system, replete with M$ Vista bloatware. Let
her play around with it until she got sick of the crap, pulled restore
DVDs and blew it all away!
So, on goes Slackware 12.0 (yeah, but it's still not all that far behind
the curve), and with a bit of fiddling, it works just fine... EXCEPT:
No ethernet access! Her's, mine, the gateway, and the printer are on a
LAN, or rather her's connected but not functioning. After painstakingly
running through the drill, nothing works. So, now the data:
1) 'ifconfig' shows that the system knows about the NIC, and has its
MAC number.
2) Yet although the same connectivity that worked fine for M$ is still
in place, at the switch (Netgear Fast Ethernet Switch FS108), the two
socket lights at the plug are lit but the activity light for that socket
is not, signifying that the signal circuit is not live. And yes I
pulled the plugs and reinserted them, no joy. The cable going bad at
this exact point in time is a bit too far-fetched, I think.
3) 'ifconfig' shows a gazillion dropped RX packets, far more than there
ever should be or far more than my own machine which has been running
fine for days (weeks, months); no TX packets at all.
If 'ifconfig' shows eth0 with all the data, and the signal light at the
switch is dark, that would seem to be a hardware problem, I would think.
Has anyone ever played with one of these plastic HP boxes? Has anyone
had occasion to run across something like this (HP NIC no work!!)? Or
scarier yet, has anyone had occasion to open up one of these cheapies,
only to find there's no place to hang an extra NIC? All I can think of
to do now is to crack the thing open and slap a known good NIC into that
bad boy, and run the LAN to eth1. If that's even possible, that is...
Any help out there would surely be appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Longfellow
Jim Diamond
> No ethernet access! Her's, mine, the gateway, and the printer are on a
> LAN, or rather her's connected but not functioning. After painstakingly
> running through the drill, nothing works. So, now the data:
>
> 1) 'ifconfig' shows that the system knows about the NIC, and has its
> MAC number.
>
> 2) Yet although the same connectivity that worked fine for M$ is still
> in place, at the switch (Netgear Fast Ethernet Switch FS108), the two
> socket lights at the plug are lit but the activity light for that socket
> is not, signifying that the signal circuit is not live. And yes I
> pulled the plugs and reinserted them, no joy. The cable going bad at
> this exact point in time is a bit too far-fetched, I think.
>
> 3) 'ifconfig' shows a gazillion dropped RX packets, far more than there
> ever should be or far more than my own machine which has been running
> fine for days (weeks, months); no TX packets at all.
>
> If 'ifconfig' shows eth0 with all the data, and the signal light at the
> switch is dark, that would seem to be a hardware problem, I would think.
>
> Has anyone ever played with one of these plastic HP boxes? Has anyone
> had occasion to run across something like this (HP NIC no work!!)? Or
> scarier yet, has anyone had occasion to open up one of these cheapies,
> only to find there's no place to hang an extra NIC? All I can think of
> to do now is to crack the thing open and slap a known good NIC into that
> bad boy, and run the LAN to eth1. If that's even possible, that is...
>
> Any help out there would surely be appreciated!
Some people who have never been near such a PC might be able to help
you, but some more info might help
- what kind of ethernet card does it have (lspci output might help)
- what driver is loaded to run it (lsmod output might help)
- are there any illuminating messages in
- dmesg
- /var/log/messages
- /var/log/syslog
- /var/log/debug
Jim
John K. Herreshoff
Did you try a different NIC cable? Or swap hers with one that works to see
if hers now works and the other does not?
?
John.
--
Using the White Box
Robby Workman
>
> the curve), and with a bit of fiddling, it works just fine... EXCEPT:
>
> No ethernet access! Her's, mine, the gateway, and the printer are on a
> LAN, or rather her's connected but not functioning. After painstakingly
> running through the drill, nothing works. So, now the data:
>
> 1) 'ifconfig' shows that the system knows about the NIC, and has its
> MAC number.
>
> 2) Yet although the same connectivity that worked fine for M$ is still
> in place, at the switch (Netgear Fast Ethernet Switch FS108), the two
> socket lights at the plug are lit but the activity light for that socket
> is not, signifying that the signal circuit is not live. And yes I
> pulled the plugs and reinserted them, no joy. The cable going bad at
> this exact point in time is a bit too far-fetched, I think.
>
> 3) 'ifconfig' shows a gazillion dropped RX packets, far more than there
> ever should be or far more than my own machine which has been running
> fine for days (weeks, months); no TX packets at all.
>
> If 'ifconfig' shows eth0 with all the data, and the signal light at the
> switch is dark, that would seem to be a hardware problem, I would think.
What driver does the NIC use? I *think* it was r8169 about which I
read on LKML -- something Windows does basically disables the NIC,
and there's nothing Linux can do to re-enable it - you have to boot
back into Windows to "fix" it and do some configuration to prevent
it from happening again. I wish I could recall more details, but I
can't - I can't even give you some good search tags to try :/
Of course, that might not be the issue at all, but barring cable
problems, it's a good possibility...
> Has anyone ever played with one of these plastic HP boxes? Has anyone
> had occasion to run across something like this (HP NIC no work!!)? Or
> scarier yet, has anyone had occasion to open up one of these cheapies,
> only to find there's no place to hang an extra NIC? All I can think of
> to do now is to crack the thing open and slap a known good NIC into that
> bad boy, and run the LAN to eth1. If that's even possible, that is...
If it comes to that, you don't have to use "eth1" for the LAN.
Assuming r8169 is the module being used by the present NIC, something
along these lines should do what you want:
echo 'blacklist r8169' > /etc/modprobe.d/r8169
rm /etc/udev/rules.d/75-network-devices.rules
The next boot after that should assign 'eth0' to the new NIC.
-RW
Sylvain Robitaille
> Has anyone ever played with one of these plastic HP boxes?
an HP Pavilion a1130n and 2 HP Pavilion m7470n media centers, all
running Slackware-10.2; an HP Pavilion a6057c running Slackware-12.0;
and an HP Pavilion a1620n running NetBSD (that one isn't mine).
Since you haven't given any details whatsoever about the system you
bought for your wife, I have no idea whether or not any of the above is
even close to the system you're referring to.
> Has anyone had occasion to run across something like this (HP NIC no
> work!!)?
No. It's pretty straightforward to get Slackware Linux running on these
systems.
> scarier yet, has anyone had occasion to open up one of these cheapies,
> only to find there's no place to hang an extra NIC?
What model do you have? All the models I have include 3 PCI slots with
at least one available.
> All I can think of to do now is to crack the thing open and slap a
> known good NIC into that bad boy, and run the LAN to eth1.
You probably don't need to do that. My guess is you don't have the
correct network interface driver running, but since you haven't provided
any details about that, it's just a guess.
--
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Sylvain Robitaille s...@alcor.concordia.ca
Network and Systems analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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