simple networking question

[Russell McManus]

"Longman, Bill" <longman@sharplabs.com> writes:

>> > To diagnose whether or not the NIC is working, plug it into 
>> your network and
>> > watch some traffic:
>> > 
>> > sudo tcpdump -i eth1
>> > 
>> > If you don't see any traffic (after "ifconfig eth1 up") then there's
>> > something wrong with the module perhaps.
>> 
>> This is making the assumption that there is some traffic in the
>> original poster's home network in the first place.  (You might want
>> to check the same on another machine that you know is working
>> properly otherwise.)
>> 
>> Setting up a few Windows machines in the network is a great way to
>> get some background noise going if there isn't any to start with.
>> 
>> Of course, even without running tcpdump "ifconfig eth1" will show
>> you the amounts of packets received and transmitted by the
>> interface so far, plus the numbers of any error conditions that
>> might have occurred.
>
> Very good points, Atro. That's probably the best route to debug --
> check the interface's own statistics first. Second, put a chattering
> Windows machine on your network (or how about a few Linux boxes
> running CUPS, spewing their incessant broadcasts every minute....) 
> and watch for traffic on the interface. One of the first rules I put
> on my firewalls is to drop all broadcast traffic on the
> interfaces. And on the inside interface, there's heaps!
>
> Russ, did you finally get your NIC to work? If you can't get DHCP on
> that interface, is there anything preventing you from using your
> built-in eth0?

Thanks for all the help on this, gents.  So far, I've gotten things
working by using eth0, and hardcoding the IP address.

Through experimentation, I have also determined that eth1 just doesn't
seem to work.  I haven't figured out whether this is a driver problem,
or what.

Why does 'man -k ifconfig' say nothing appropriate, even though 'man
ifconfig' works?


-russ