Two NIC problem

[JRoque]

Hello,

I'm installing 710 on a new box with a Gigabyte motherboard and a couple of embedded Realtek RTL8111C NICs. MCE will not connect to the external NIC (eth0) if the internal card (eth1) is enabled. I thought it was something with the two built-in cards but each of them connect fine under another OS and diagnostics. After hours of working this problem, I disabled one of the cards and installed a separate NIC on the PCI port (eth2). It was only then that MCE connected to the external port but now the internal port doesn't work.

Note that when I first finished installing MCE, eth0 was assigned to the internal network. I thought this was the problem and ran the "swap" button in the admin screen. That made external to be eth0 and internal eth1 but this change did nothing to get external to connect.

If possible, I'd like to have my directors on a separate segment than the rest of the network. Any hints?

Thanks,
JR

[jondecker76]

media directors must be on the same subnet as the core - this is needed for network boot.

As far as the other problems, i've never seen that happen. Maybe the next device downstream on your external network isn't handing out DHCP addresses?

[Monkgs]

This could very likely be the case if you have been swapping ports. My cable provider only allows one leased IP at a time. Usually if I'm swapping routers I have to call them and get them to remove the DHCP lease.

[JRoque]

Thanks for the very quick comment. I tried both dhcp and static setups. The router on the "external" network is setup as a dhcp server and that works fine. Right now, the external network work (192.168.0.x) while the internal network does not. One thing I just noticed is that when I click the "View IP address" (?) button, eth1 does not have a mac address bound to it. This leads me to believe it is still wanting to bind to the disabled NIC and not use the new one (eth2). Is there something hardcoded to use eth0 and eth1 only? Can I edit the mac address so it binds to the new card and not try to load the disabled one?


For clarification, my network looks like this:
Starts with a cable modem and goes into a router. This router provides DHCP services to the LAN in the 192.168.0.0 sub. The MCE is one of those 192.168.0.xxx addresses, static defined, on it's "external" port. On the internal port, no amount of changing from dhcp to static makes a difference as it's always 192.168.80.1. There's not physical connectivity between the internal and external subs. The directors will go on the internal net.

Thanks,
JR

[jimmejames]

It sounds like you're having a similar issue as me:  http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5995.0  are you, by chance, running the 64 bit AMD version?

I was hoping to look at it again this weekend.  For now, I disabled the onboard NIC, installed a new NIC (fortunately my board has 2 pci ports) and reinstalled LMCE- now everything works great.  I did a quick google search, and I'm pretty sure our onboard nics are fairly different- you're not alone.

[JRoque]

Hey JJ. No, I'm running 32 bit on Intel.

I noticed you're running your "internal" network on eth0 just as I was when the install finished. Is this a supported config? I thought I read on another posting that you must run external on eth0.

Too bad this thing isn't working. I wanted to plug everything in this weekend and do the show-and-tell for the wife (read: try to justify the $$$ spent on unnecessary gadgets).

Thanks,
JR

[colinjones]

Your external network should be eth0 and internal should be eth1 - anything else will cause you headaches.

Yes, it sounds like you are having problems between the disabled NIC and the card. Get the MAC addresses of each and do a search for "udev" on the forums. You will find some posts from me that detail how to set up a couple of udev rules to force the right ethx to the right interface. Also, disable that NIC in BIOS if you can to prevent it interacting with the kernel at all.

[JRoque]

Collin, dude, that was it! Ok here's my observations and (temporary) solution.

When installing the core - perhaps on my particular combination of hardware (and luck) - eth0 gets assigned to the internal network. I installed the whole thing twice and it did this consistently. As Collin commented on one of his previous posts, there's an error during the install or first boot that might be the root of the problem. I see in the firstboot.log a "device1 has a bad mac address" error then everything gets messed up from there, it seems.

I installed two new NICs on PCI slots for now. I wrote down the mac addresses and went to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and edited eth0 for the corresponding mac address I wanted to make my external and the same for eth1, the internal card. Save, reboot and all is good. It connected to the mothership on the external net and discovered my HDHomeRun on the internal net.

After I get to play around with it a bit more - I haven't slept a wink in 26 hours now messing with this - I'm going to try the above solution for the internal cards. BTW, I installed this on a Gigabyte P45 motherboard that I heard elsewhere was not compatible with MCE. As soon as I get it a bit more stable, I'll add the case to the wiki.

Thanks all for your help, I guess we can close this one out.

JR