# ethernet connection problems

## candistyx

Today I took my laptop up to the university to try and set up the wireless and connect it to the university network. I failed rather badly at doing that, because in the process I caused the /etc/init.d/net.lo to no longer start (ERROR: not enough args).

Anyway, once I deleted all the wlan0 stuff out of /etc/conf.d/net that problem went away lo and eth0 both start up normally when I boot up my computer. But eth0 is still having problems (I'll worry about wireless later...).

ifconfig looks fine to me, but nothing works. If I ping anything except itself, it says Destination Host Unreachable, it certainly doesn't connect to the internet, does not recognise the LAN and the LAN does not recognise it.

The ip, broadcast, mask and gateway are all set the same as they were before. The dns server is set the same as before - but its irrelevant since it can't even ping ip addresses.

All the files I can remember changing look the same as they did before, although presumably I must have forgotten something or it would work right?

Ah, in /var/log/messages when I restart /etc/init.d/net.eth0 it says:

[ 2650.694058] r8169: eth0: link down

[ 2650.694105] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready

Which is about the only clue I've been able to find.

Before I went up to the university earlier today it worked fine, same cable, etc.

edit: ok im really confused... it doesn't even work when I boot from a cd. What on earth could I have done?

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## ziggysquatch

Was it the same cable in all the testing?  Maybe it's a coincidence and the cable is damaged.  

That's the only reason I could see it would say link down all of a sudden.

What's the output of ethtool eth0?  How does the duplex and speed compare to what it's supposed to be?

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## candistyx

Swapped the cables round between this comp and laptop, this one still connects laptop still doesn't.

ethtool just says the same thing, link detected: no, everything else looks normal. Speed 10Mb/s (slower than the card says but... it is not abnormal for it to say this) Duplex: Half.

...

You know what, I think this is just a recurrance of this laptop's old ethernet problems from years back... and its just a coincidence that it happened when I was messing about with it. Even the network boot option doesnt recognise when there is a cable in, it must be a hardware thing.

I guess its back to the lame usb-ethernet adaptors.

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