Table of Contents
Hardware configuration (see LPI 101)
Configure a Linux system for networking
Understand routing
Use network troubleshouting tools
The network interface card (NIC) must be supported by the kernel.
To determine which card you are using you can get information from
dmesg, /proc/interrupts,
/sbin/lsmod. or /etc/modules.conf
Example 4.1. Determining the NIC model
# dmesg Linux Tulip driver version 0.9.14 (February 20, 2001) PCI: Enabling device 00:0f.0 (0004 -> 0007) PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:0f.0 eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xf800, ... ... 00:A0:CC:D3:6E:0F, IRQ 10. eth0: MII transceiver #1 config 3000 status 7829 ... ... advertising 01e1.
# cat /proc/interrupts 0: 8729602 XT-PIC timer 1: 4 XT-PIC keyboard 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 7: 0 XT-PIC parport0 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 10: 622417 XT-PIC eth0 11: 0 XT-PIC usb-uhci 14: 143040 XT-PIC ide0 15: 180 XT-PIC ide1
# /sbin/lsmod Module Size Used by tulip 37360 1 (autoclean)
From the example above we see that the Ethernet cards chipset is Tulip, the i/o address is 0xf800 and the IRQ is 10. This information can be used either if the wrong module is being used or if the resources (i/o or IRQ) are not available.
This information can either be used to insert a module with a
different i/o address (using the modprobe or
insmod utilities) or can be saved in
/etc/modules.conf
(this will save the settings for the next system boot).