From 10.04 32bit to 10.10 64bit with raid and I can't get wired internet to work

[Alcareru]

What about the BIOS for you mainboard? Is it the latest and greatest? Looks like your nic is just a generation or two away from mine and I am having no problems. (so far)

I'll look into that. Ty for the suggestion. I'll report how it worked.

[s_raiguel]

I have this same exact NIC, and had exactly the same problem: it would connect about one out of every 6-8 reboots under 64-bit 10.10, but yet there were no problems either with 64-bit 10.04 or with 34-bit 10.10 What finally fixed it was downloading the e1000e driver from the Intel website and installing it by untarring, then doing make install. Now, I get a connection with (almost) every reboot. I'm not sure what was going on, but I had the vague impression that maybe there was some kind of timing problem at boot.

[Alcareru]

Thank you everybody for your responses. Sorry for not being very active with this.. I've found my self too busy with other things so I just installed the 32 bit version and used it. I've had some weird issues with that one too but at least the internet works.

Anyhow, now I'm back to try to get this 64 bit OS working. I decided to start out by first installing it again. No surprise the installation process failed to connect to internet. This time I already knew specifying static settings would not work so I just skipped that face all together. When I dully booted up the new operating system, lo and behold she's alive. The network just works. Next, I did several reboots and eth0 is up and working after each one. This is certanly starting to look promesing. Will this dream be shattered after kernel update? With my fingers crossed I'm anxiously waiting for all the updates to get installed... rebootting... and ta'da no internet connection. Damn.

Ok, lets dig deeper. I modified /etc/default/grub and ran update-grub. My intention was to make grub accessible at boot time so that I could choose the old kernel to test it was indeed the kernel update that broke things. Well, this had some interesting effect as well. Grub was not coming up (I set the hidden timeout to 4 and hidden timeout quiet to false and even uncommented the grub init tune to make it beep when grub loads, but no beeps, no counters, no nothing no matter what I press during startup). However now my network is working again. What on earth is going on here? I then revoked my changes to grub settings, ran update-grub and rebooted. After 5 more reboots I concluded that for some weird reason just running update-grub after the kernel update was probably all that was required to fix the network problem created by kernel update.

Well, lets see how long this'll keep running smoothly. Perhaps bios update and/or compiling the lates intel provided drivers wouldn't be too bad idea on the long run, but for now this seems to work well enough.

Thanks everybody. I'll mark this thread solved if no more problems occur withing the next couple of days.

[Alcareru]

Ok. After a good nights sleep, the problem is back. Or was back. I booted up this morning and after long struggle to get the thing on (a some sort of "brown screen booting syndrome", of which I will be making another thread soon) I get to log in and no internet connection. Just to be sure I rebooted, no internet connection. As ridiculous as the "update-grub fix" sounds I decided to try it anyhow. I changed nothing, instead I only ran update-grub, followed by reboot. Now internet works.

I think I'll be upgrading the BIOS next (if updates are available). Now, if it is a timing problem as s_raiguel suggested what could cause it and could timing problems cause trouble with graphics drivers (not) getting (properly) loaded (also causing the "brown screen booting syndrome")? Could bios update help and why self compiled drivers might help?

[Alcareru]

I've updated the BIOS to latest version. I'm still unsure of its effects on this. Last time it worked. Though as I was struggling with my other problem I did try the "magic trick" update-grub and reboot. It didn't work for it, though, and I'm not sure if I even managed to execute it 'cos I couldn't see what I was doing.. I'll report some more about this soon. In the mean time I'd appreciate some help with that other issue if you can spare the time.

[Alcareru]

Today I witnessed my first network fail after BIOS update. It also started to work after 3 reboots without running update-grub. Perhaps running update-grub makes no difference and it was just an unlikely coincident that the problem resolved twice right after doing that. I guess I need to try compiling the driver next. Anyhow, I think it's the problem isn't so bad as it used to be. I mean originally when I created this thread I was literally unable to connect to internet. Now it seems more like it works most of the time.

[Alcareru]

I compiled the latest e1000e driver from Intels site. It seems to work a bit better, but it still doesn't work every time. However as of so far running:
sudo modprobe -r e1000e && sudo modprobe e1000e
seems to do the trick, when it doesn't work.

[Alcareru]

Today I updated kernel again. Along with the new kernel came new old e1000e drivers. Naturally no internet connection after boot. So I decided to do some testing.
The old driver version that shipped with kernel 2.6.35-25-generic
is 1.0.2-k4 *. The newest version available (afaik) is 1.2.20-NAPI. So with the old driver I tried many many many times removing the module and reloading it, but to no avail. However when I installed the new driver for this kernel too and then reloaded the driver eth0 gets right up.

So to conclude this all. The best solution so far is to use a newer driver. Version: 1.2.20-NAPI seems to work ok. Sure you need to recompile it every time you upgrade to a new kernel and it still seems to fail sometimes, but (with this driver) reloading it seems to always fix that. At least you don't need to go through some crazy rebooting hell.

Thanks you all for your help. Special thanks to s_raiguel for ultimately providing the best solution!

* You can check the driver version by running: ethtool -i eth0