From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10 Description of problem: I Have AMD PCNet 79C978 HomePNA card, and when I first made a fresh Fedora Core 2 installation from CD ROM images, my network connection worked fine. But after updating my installation up to date (installed all updates available 23.10.2004) network connection stopped working. During boot and later when I try to say "#service network restart" I get the message "link is down, check the cable". I found an older very similar looking problem from bug database (ID 111178), and I assumed that these problems might be related. Therefore I targetted this problem to initscripts, and I apologize if that is not the case. But It should be mentioned that during the update of my system not only initscripts-7.53-1 was replaced with initscripts-7.55.1-1, but also kernel-2.6.5-1 was replaced with kernel-2.6.8-1 I tried networking with both kernel versions, with no success, and I also tried to reinstall (with --nodeps --oldpackage options) the original version of initscripts, and tried that with both kernels. But neither of these procedures helped. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-7.55.1-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install Fedora Core 2 to a machine with AMD PCNet 79C978 HomePNA network connection. Connection works fine. 2. Update machine, forexample with yum 3. Try to start network connection Actual Results: Network connection does not start, instead error "Link is down, check the cable" is printed. Expected Results: Network connection should be established as before. Additional info: With the Reproducibility I mean that problem occures every time I try to use NW and with every combination of initscript and kernel version I installed and tried on the system, as explained before. I did not make a fresh installation every time :)
Same problem occures with a new installation of Fedora Core 3 test 3, AMD PCNet HomePNA adapter is recognized correctly, but network connection fails. I just get the same notification as with Fedora Core 2, that is "Link is down, check the cable". I have a dual boot configuration on the machine, and the card works ok in windows XP. So far, only new installation of Fedora Core 2 without any updates worked correctly.
Assuming the card is eth0, try adding either of these lines: options eth0 homepna=1 options pcnet32 homepna=1 to your /etc/modprobe.conf. (I would then run "depmod -a" and reboot. Maybe a "depmod -a; /etc/init.d/network restart" or a reboot alone would suffice, however.) Then see if you still have the problem. On an unrelated note, in the future please write (for example) "bug 111178", not "ID 111178", for bugs within this Bugzilla database. That way, Bugzilla can automatically turn it into a clickable link like the one in the previous sentence. Thanks!
BTW, some more info on why this is happening: Previously, the connection to use on these cards (HomePNA or Ethernet) had to be selected at compile time by changing the pcnet32.c source code file. Recently, the driver was changed so that the type of connection could be specified using a kernel configuration option (so that, like any other Linux Ethernet driver, you could change the configuration without having to edit the source code). Finally, the driver was improved again, so that you can now choose at module load time rather than having to recompile the kernel.
Hi Barry, I'm sorry for my answer being late, but I wasn't able to do the test before today. Your suggestition worked fine, many thanks for that!! I just added the options -line (options eth0 homepna=1) under the alias definition of eth0 and after updating module dependencies and booting the machine network worked just fine. This was clearly not a bug, and I should have looked the documentation of the driver before making bug report, I apologize of causing extra work to you all. br. JP