No Network with Knoppix3.2 and RTL8139 nic...

[catfish]

Hi,
I tried Knoppix 3.2 06/06/2003 from CD on a P4, 512M RAM with a DLink-RTL8139 nic and cannot get networking to work. I don't suspect h/w because both RH7.3 and WindexPee on the same machine do work (both are booted from the hard drive).

Attempting to DHCP always fails with "Operation failure". I've configured the nic with static parameters (via netcardconfig) and ifconfig seems to report everything okay. However I can't ping anything other than the localhost. Curiously enough, I started ethereal while ping was running and the only packets it displayed were ARP requests (for the "pinged" IP). Running "arp" also just shows an empty table.

lsmod shows 8139too and mii loaded. I've tried mii-tool to reset, restart auto-negotiation and force specific medial all without success. I have noticed that lsmod reports the size of 8139too as 17128 under knoppix but as 16448 under RH7.3.

I'm greatly impressed with knoppix. The machine also has an ATI TV Wonder which" just worked" under knoppix (you wouldn't believe the battle to get it working under XP However I need to solve this networking trouble.

Any clues?
Thanks,

[Loper]

I tried Knoppix 3.2 06/06/2003 from CD on a P4, 512M RAM with a D-Link RTL8139 nic and cannot get networking to work.

The RTL8139 works fine for me on 2 different NICs (D-Link and Encore). What messages are you seeing at startup? Does the system message list say anything about backgrounding? Mine does. I use it, as now, to access my ADSL.

[Harry Kuhman]

I started ethereal while ping was running and the only packets it displayed were ARP requests (for the "pinged" IP).

Sure sounds like what I was seeing when my NIC stopped working. Ethereal on the Knoppix system still saw the ARP packets. Indeed they were coming in and the NIC would see all packets, but since the switch never got any response from Knoppix it didn't know it was there and, being a switch, it never sent anything else down the ethernet cable to the knoppix system, just the occasional arp packet in case something did connect and wanted to ID itself. I put a hub in the line and then I was able to watch traffic to and from the other computers on the hub. Also, in my case, ethereal would report outbound packets, but they were never really going out. I could prove that by watching from another computer on the hub with ethereal and seeing that the wire stayed quiet from my Knoppix system.

Sorry that the mii-tool -r trick isn't working for you, seems to help some but not others. Also, it works for me with Knoppix but not with Morphix, which seems strange since Morphix claims to be a Knoppix rebuild with different packages installed. (Of course, I don't know for sure that you even have the same problem, but it seems very likely). I did come across one other way that I could get my NIC working under Knoppix, by using the expert option at boot. This also may not work for you, but seems worth a try. See the message I posted in Evidence WinXP "security updates" may break Linux
for the details.

[catfish]

The RTL8139 works fine for me on 2 different NICs (D-Link and Encore). What messages are you seeing at startup? Does the system message list say anything about backgrounding? Mine does. I use it, as now, to access my ADSL.

I do see the "backgrounding" text but don't notice anything that looks like an error or exception message. I guess I should check syslog (/var/log/{dmesg,messages} ???) for more info?

[catfish]

Hi,
I tried Knoppix 3.2 06/06/2003 from CD on a P4, 512M RAM with a DLink-RTL8139 nic and cannot get networking to work. I don't suspect h/w because both RH7.3 and WindexPee on the same machine do work (both are booted from the hard drive).

Attempting to DHCP always fails with "Operation failure". I've configured the nic with static parameters (via netcardconfig) and ifconfig seems to report everything okay. However I can't ping anything other than the localhost. Curiously enough, I started ethereal while ping was running and the only packets it displayed were ARP requests (for the "pinged" IP). Running "arp" also just shows an empty table.

lsmod shows 8139too and mii loaded. I've tried mii-tool to reset, restart auto-negotiation and force specific medial all without success. I have noticed that lsmod reports the size of 8139too as 17128 under knoppix but as 16448 under RH7.3.

I'm greatly impressed with knoppix. The machine also has an ATI TV Wonder which" just worked" under knoppix (you wouldn't believe the battle to get it working under XP However I need to solve this networking trouble.

Any clues?
Thanks,

FYI... PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!
There was a clue in the system startup messages (dmesg):
"NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 transmit timed out"
Since the networking configuration seemed okay and the mii-tool command seemed to work (i.e., the light on the switch would flash when auto-negotitation occurred), the problem seemed related to how the nic hardware was handled, (especially with the transmit timeout error).

Simply booting with: "knoppix noapic" makes everything work.
From other sources on the net this issue appears to be systemic to debian and not directly related to knoppix.

Hope this info may help others who have similar troubles...
Cheers,

[Harry Kuhman]

FYI... PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!....
Simply booting with: "knoppix noapic" makes everything work.
From other sources on the net this issue appears to be systemic to debian and not directly related to knoppix.

Hope this info may help others who have similar troubles...

I'm very interested in this. The Knoppix cheat codes text does not list a noapic option, nor does it appear on the F2 help screen. Can you give us more details? Do you know what noapic actually does; what do you not have when you boot Knoppix this way? Can you provide the links that you found to this?

I found recently and reported in another thread that I was able to get past my network access problem by booting Knoppix with the expert option and selecting N for each option. I've now confirmed this back through all of my Knoppix CD's, the oldest being V3.1 8-August-02, although the CD used to work fine with the default boot. I also found that it is the scsi autoprobe that is triggering the problem in my case; if I hit return for autoprobe rather than n when asked the first question in expert mode my system fails the same way it does under default. I have no actual scsi device on the notebook but I do have a dvd/cdrw drive; I don't know yet if bypassing autoprobe causes me to not be able to write CD's (hard to experiment with this, there's something in the drive when I run knoppix and I'm not installing to hard disk so all that CD writing stuff in Knoppix does me little good). If anyone has insight on why the autoprobe feature now seems to conflict with the NIC (particlarly if you understand why it didn't before with the same CD) please let me know.

By the way, the noapic option when booting knoppix does not seem to help me. When I boot this way I still have the same problem with my NIC that I've previously reported.

[catfish]

FYI... PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!....
Simply booting with: "knoppix noapic" makes everything work.
From other sources on the net this issue appears to be systemic to debian and not directly related to knoppix.

Hope this info may help others who have similar troubles...

I'm very interested in this. The Knoppix cheat codes text does not list a noapic option, nor does it appear on the F2 help screen. Can you give us more details? Do you know what noapic actually does; what do you not have when you boot Knoppix this way? Can you provide the links that you found to this?

I found recently and reported in another thread that I was able to get past my network access problem by booting Knoppix with the expert option and selecting N for each option. I've now confirmed this back through all of my Knoppix CD's, the oldest being V3.1 8-August-02, although the CD used to work fine with the default boot. I also found that it is the scsi autoprobe that is triggering the problem in my case; if I hit return for autoprobe rather than n when asked the first question in expert mode my system fails the same way it does under default. I have no actual scsi device on the notebook but I do have a dvd/cdrw drive; I don't know yet if bypassing autoprobe causes me to not be able to write CD's (hard to experiment with this, there's something in the drive when I run knoppix and I'm not installing to hard disk so all that CD writing stuff in Knoppix does me little good). If anyone has insight on why the autoprobe feature now seems to conflict with the NIC (particlarly if you understand why it didn't before with the same CD) please let me know.

By the way, the noapic option when booting knoppix does not seem to help me. When I boot this way I still have the same problem with my NIC that I've previously reported.

I'm using knoppix 3.2 06/06/2003 and pressing F2 at the boot prompt does list "apic" on the "no {scsi, pcmcia,...} line (fourth line from bottom). APIC refers to Advance Programmable Interrupt Controller - the piece of h/w that arbitrates the hardware interrupts (IRQs). I believe specifying "noapic" changes the settings the kernel uses to configure the interrupt controller. In my case I assume it causes a "workaround" of some pecularity in the BIOS. I don't believe "noapic" causes any serious side-effects other than performance may suffer under heavy interrupt loads.

I don't have the exact reference that I found, but it suggested two things: make sure PnP OS is OFF in the BIOS settings, and try noapic with the kernal. A couple of other references I know are:
http://hypermail.idiosynkrasia.net/l...294.html<br />
http://www.pantek.com/library/linux/...pts.html<br />
BTW, I did try your suggestion of booting "expert" but it didn't change anything (I even attempted loading a different 8139too module from a floppy without success).

I also understand that linux treats CDR devices as scsi devices and will load a "scsi emulator" (ide-scsi) module if the device is actually an IDE device (lsmod should show ide-scsi). I'm afraid I have no speculation regarding how scsi autoprobe can mess the nic.

[zjr]

By the way, the noapic option when booting knoppix does not seem to help me. When I boot this way I still have the same problem with my NIC that I've previously reported.

My Configuration(HD Install)
------------------------------------------------
System: Compaq Presario 900US
Processor: AMD Mobile Athlon XP 1700+ / 256kB cache
Memory: 512MB PC-2100 DDR SO-DIMM (2x256MB)
Display: ATI Mobility U1 (similar to Radeon 7500) on a 15" TFT XGA display (1024x76
Hard Drive: 30GB Toshiba on an ALI southbridge controller (ATA100)
Sound: ALI M5451 onboard PCI
Network: Realtek RTL8139 C+ Fast Ethernet (using 8139too module)
Dual booting with Windows XP with SP1 and all current security updates
-------------------------------------------------

It does not work for me either. For whatever reason my BIOS disables APIC by default but Knoppix always reenables it at boot. I've been searching for two days on a way to disable apic or prevent Knoppix from reenabling it on boot.

I too have the same network issue, mii-tool -r followed by netcardconfig doesn't resolve the issue.

I did find a minor fix to the problem, i found it odd that when i first used Knoppix i could ping the gateway and proxy server on the network. After a few reboots i started to get the NETDEV.... error. I tried several boots with different options as well as removing some modules i added to /etc/modules to be automatically loaded, no luck. Finally i booted with Linux nopcmcia and sure enough i had network access again. Too bad its not fully operational. After setting the $http_proxy variable and doing a apt-get update and apt-get -u upgrade as well as testing out lynx i decided to start KDE(which for the record i'm not a fan of), to my surprise i couldn't ping anything on the network or pull up pages. So i did a Ctrl+Alt+2 to pull up command line and the first thing i see is our beloved NETDEV error.

For whatever reason under my configuration the network is not accessible under KDE. On the same command line i did a netcardconfig and i was able to use apt-get and lynx again but nothing in GUI.