[Solved] - Dapper Upgrade Breaks Networking on Koala Mini

[mistermix]

I have a Koala mini that I'm using as a server. It worked fine with Breezy. I just dist-upgraded to Dapper and installed a new kernel (2.6.15-26-686). Now eth0 doesn't come up. I tried
modprobe r8169
ifup eth0
and that didn't work. Also tried adding
alias eth0 r8169
to /etc/modprobe.d/i386 and rebooting. That also didn't work.

I wonder if anyone else has seen this and has a solution. In the meantime, I've dropped back to the 2.6.12-10-686.

Thanks.

[crichell]

do you have wireless in your Koala?

I have heard of this once with a Gazelle Value. We went into the working kernel and installed network-manager-gnome. We could then go back into the newest kernel and connect to both wired and wireless via the new network-manager applet next to the clock.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome

This doesn't necesarrily answer what's going on but since the Dapper release we've moved to network-manager-gnome anyway and it's a much better method to connect to networks.

[mistermix]

Thanks for the reply. No, I don't have wireless in this Koala. Actually, I'm using it as a low power consumption small footprint server on our network. I removed all of the X packages from it, so gnome-network-manager won't help.

I'll keep looking into it and post to this thread if I figure it out.

[crichell]

Some people have reported that adding irqpoll to the end of the grub kernel parameters fixed the issue.

This thread may be helpfull:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=187316&page=3

[mistermix]

irqpoll doesn't work either.

I assume that you're sending out Koalas with 2.6.15-26 on them and they work. Has there been a bios flash that I might have missed?

[crichell]

The dapper upgrade probably changed the eth designation from eth0 to eth1 or 2. Do an ifconfig and check what eth card is listed.

/etc/network/interfaces may need to be updated - especially if you're using static addresses

[mistermix]

There's no interface other than lo listed by ifconfig.

I think what's happening is that the 2.6.15 r8169 module is hanging the first time it is accessed. After booting 2.6.15, lsmod shows the r8169 module loaded. If I run "ethtool eth0", I just get "no such device" errors. If I remove r8169, and run ethtool eth0, I get this output:

Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Half
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)
Link detected: yes


If I run "ethtool eth0" again, I just get errors. So just trying to talk to the card breaks stuff.

So, my question: do you have any Koala Mini's running 6.06 LTS?

Thanks...

[crichell]

do you have any Koala Mini's running 6.06 LTS?

Yes - but we're of course not upgrading from Breezy (although we didn't have troubles there either - and another customer in this forum upgraded from Breezy to Dapper without trouble)

can you post your /etc/network/interfaces file?

[mistermix]

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# This is a list of hotpluggable network interfaces.
# They will be activated automatically by the hotplug subsystem.
#auto eth1

# The primary network interface
#iface eth1 inet dhcp

iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth0

[crichell]

From the new kernel:

lshal |grep eth

look for an entry such as: net.interface = 'ethX'

ethX is the kernel designation given to the ethernet card. /etc/network/interfaces needs to be adjusted to ethX if it is different than eth0.

[mistermix]

That was it - it was on eth2. I didn't have lshal, but

lshw | grep eth

works also.

The underlying reason for the problem was that there were MAC addresses defined for eth0 and eth1 in /etc/iftab. I don't know where those MACs came from, but neither corresponded to the built-in networking in the box.

For some reason, the 2.6.12 kernel ignored /etc/iftab, but 2.6.15 didn't, and therefore it assigned eth2 to the built-in network.

Thanks for your help!