Changing network cards

[Stingly]

When I first made up my core machine I used a load of old parts, just to see if I got on with LMCE and whether it did what I wanted it to do. Consequently I used 2 god-knows-how-old network cards that I'm unsure of the speed or model of, and everything worked and life was peachy.

Now I'm getting a bit more serious. I've upgraded my internal hub to a gigabit switch, and bought 2 new D-Link DGE-528T network cards for the core machine (as well as some other goodies, like a Nokia 770 and wifi access point). I thought that it would be a simple case of swapping the old card for the new in my core, but when I did so, nothing worked. I couldn't see the core from any machine that it was supposed to be assigning IP addresses to, the core couldn't see the NAS drive, no machine on my network could access the internet etc. I concluded that the network cards didn't work (everything was lit up correctly though) and swapped them back to the old ones, which work fine again.

The question is: what do I need to do to get my shiny new cards to play nice with LMCE? I'm sure theres some easy step that I've not thought about, but what is it!?!?! 

[jriofrio]

My first though will be the D-Link DGE-528T drivers.

Linux drivers in this case. I am not sure if there is a list of known Network Cards that LinuxMCE had been tested.
So, try to find out if those cards (D-Link DGE-528T) are in the list, if YES, you will probably find the solution to your problem.
If there is such a list, you will see the models you can use.

No all the NICs (networks cards) will have linux drivers available.

Good luck

[teedge77]

do the cards show up at all?
its not as easy as just switching them out and it magically working again.
all the internal stuff that has been assigned to each NIC doesnt just magically get reassigned to the new NIC you put in.
You will need to configure each card.
if they dont even show up then you will need to install the drivers.
did you try looking at the d-link web site to see if it had linux drivers?

[tekoholic]

One other thing I'd look at would be how / where linux places the new NIC's...  Your first pair would likely have been detected and placed on eth0 and eth1.  IF Linux detected and loaded drivers for the new cards, even though the first 2 have been removed, they would probably be placed on eth2 and eth3.  Of course, unless you've already changed this, LMCE is configured still to use eth0 and eth1, so your network can't work.  If you've not already changed this setting, go to console, do "ifconfig", find out if the cards are detected and usable, find out which 'eth' each is seen as, and change the networking settings in LMCE to reference them appropriately.

Just my own thoughts...  I've experienced this very issue (NOT with LMCE, but with Linux in general), and wrestled with it for hours...  Hope I'm able to save you some time...

[Stingly]

Cool, thanks for the advice!

At the moment I've put the old cards back into the machine, just to get things working again, but will try it with the new ones later and let you know how I get on!

[Zaerc]

You'll probably need to edit /etc/iftab as this file seems to bind specific MAC-addresses to ethX (0,1,...) devices.