[tulip] - Newbie - Problems with installing the tulip.o modul

[Michael Chaney]

> Donald thank you so much for your help I have spent almost two months
trying
> to get this network card installed.  But I am still a little unclear on
> exactly what we just did.
>
> I ran the ifup eth0 first and it returned usage: ifup <device name> not
sure
> why it didnt recognize it.

[Giving Donald a short break]

The command "ifup eth0" assumes that you have eth0 somehow "configured" on
your system.  If you're a RedHat user, that configuration is in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, and will look something like
this:

DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=207.65.71.50
NETMASK=255.255.255.240
NETWORK=207.65.71.48
BROADCAST=207.65.71.63
ONBOOT=yes

Hopefully, this is all pretty self-explanatory.  Most distros have something
similar.  Suse sets this stuff in its big rc script, for example.  But
almost all distros have a way (linuxconf, yast, etc.) to add and manage the
interface via a tool which is presumably easier than hand-editing the config
files.

At any rate, if you type "ifup eth0" and it returned a usage, it's because
it didn't find the configuration information for eth0.  On to ifconfig....

> After I ran the other command ifconfig eth0
> 192.168.1.1 and then ifconfig it found the eth0.  Does the ifconfig
eth0....
> assign a specific IP address to the eth0 interface? And why use
192.168.1.1?

ifconfig is used to configure your network interfaces, which includes
assigning an ip, and network mask, broadcast address, etc.

Donald used 192.168.1.1 because it's a safe IP address to use.  You need to
replace that with whatever the correct IP address for this machine is.  If
the network is working under Windows, then boot into Windows, open the Start
menu, choose "Run...", type "winipcfg" in the box that comes up and press
"enter".  You'll be greeted with a dialog that shows the information for
each network interface, choose your network card and press the "More info>>"
button.  You can see there what the IP Address is.  If you're using DHCP to
obtain that address (i.e. "DHCP Server", "Lease Obtained", and "Lease
Expires" are populated) then you'll have to set up DHCP on the Linux side,
and I don't even want to go there.

The simple fact is this: if you can use "ifconfig" to start the interface,
then it's working.  You just need to configure the system to know about it.

> I dont really understand that command?  Also will I need to reassign the
> eth0 everytime after a reboot or will it be done automatically?  I am
> assuming if the answer is no, then I must set a config file or something
so
> it does set the eth0 automatically.

Yes, you need to learn how to set it up.  Try "linuxconf", if that doesn't
work, try "yast".  Not sure what is used in Debian.  You'll have to poke
around a bit.

Hope this all helps.

Michael
--
Michael Darrin Chaney
mdchaney@michaelchaney.com
http://www.michaelchaney.com