[vox-tech] Getting lan connection to work on mandrake 9

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Dan Scholl <djscholl@ucdavis.edu> 
> 
> I recently installed mandrake 9 on my system and am trying to connect to 
> the ucd LAN.  When I try to configure the internet i get an error message 
> that says the following:
> 
> ismod'ing module sis900 failed at /usr/lib/libDrakX/modules.pm line 55
> 
> sis900 is my ethernet card which is onboard (asus p4s8x). Does anyone know 
> what this means?
>                  Thx,
>                   Dan

hi dan,

it means that the kernel tried to load the sis900 driver and it failed
for some reason.

often a single NIC chipset contains many variants.  prime example would
be the rtl9129, rtl3139 and tulip based cards.  these cards are so
similar that the driver author decided to combine the cards into a
single driver.  sometimes you need to pass arguments to the driver to
make them work correctly.

as a first step, make absolutely sure you know your hardware.  "lspci
-v" can help you here.   so can "dmesg | less".

as a second step, take a look at the ethernet howto.  by all means,
DON'T read the whole thing.  it's not a document meant to be read; it's
more of a reference.  look up the entry for your card's chipset.  vim's
search utility with regex is perfect for this.

as a third step (really this should be step 0), take a look at your log
files.  if you don't know where they are, you probably need to go to
borders and get one of those "que sized" books on basic linux, if
for no other reason than as a reference.  or perhaps mandarke comes with
a manual?  i dunno.

as a fourth step, you can try to insmod the module by hand, but my guess
you'll see the standard non-helpful message "loading of module failed.
hint: you can pass irq, ioport blah blah blah".

as a fifth step, i'd simply recompile the kernel with the module built
in.  NIC drivers are good candidates to be bolted into the kernel.

there are a few different reasons why module insmoding can fail.  wrong
hardware, undefined symbols, dependency breaking (module stacking is
when one module needs to be loaded before another).  you need to figure
out why the insmod failed.   i guess this should be the first paragraph.
oh well.  i'm feeling non-linear tonight.

hummm... had one more thing to say... oh yeah.  welcome to the world of
gui configuration.  in my experience, distros like mandrake have really
nifty config tools and do a great job of autoconfing stuff.  the problem
is when they don't work.  it can make your job 10 times harder (or in
the case of windows, impossible).

try out my suggestions and let me know how things turn out.  don't
forget to post the relvent sections of your log files.

hth,
pete

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