My wired network interface seems to send no packets

[Sir Bedevere]

Hi all

Before all, excuse me if this subject was already posted once, but due to its very general theme I couldn't figure out how to make a proper search on it ... Sorry for my slightly approximative english, too.

Well, my problem is this one : I installed gentoo on a notebook with the minimal install CD and no network (but my desktop PC is at hand to download portage packets and transfer them with an USB key). It finally worked, I compiled the kernel, installed grub, etc ... No I'd like to be able to connect to the internet, and there is a problem : I've got two interfaces, one wired and the other wireless, and none of them work.

The Net can be accessed via a WiFi network. But my hardware is quite new and it seems that the Intel driver (for th 4965AGN chipset) won't be out before a couple of weeks/months. And ndiswrapper crashes (1.46) or crashes AND do a kernel panic (1.45) if I try to use it. So I imagined that I could use my desktop as a gateway and connect it to the laptop with a wire.

Problem is : It looks like my interface sends nothing to the network, and is not very comprehensive. These are some tests I made, and I don't understand the results :
- Connect the two machines (notebook and desktop) with a crossed cable, give the interfaces the IPs 192.168.2.2/24 and 192.168.2.3/24 and try a ping => No answer. Checked with two different cables, cables tested with a multimeter.
- Connect the two machines (notebook and desktop) with a straight cable, give the interfaces the IPs 192.168.2.2/24 and 192.168.2.3/24 and try a ping => No answer.
- Connect the laptop to a router and ping : no answer
- Connect the laptop to the same router, ping and access the web interface under windows XP : works

From this I suppose that the hardware is not (at least not totally) out of order (I bought the PC three days ago, it should not be the case ...), but for some reason I can't send anything on it with Gentoo, although ifconfig -a sees an "eth0" interface. Oo

Does someone has a clue ?


Network configuration (notebook) :
------------------------------------------
IP : 192.168.2.2, netmask 255.255.255.0

I did a "rout add default gw 192.168.2.3" (or 192.168.2.1 when I tried this with the router between the two PCs)

Hardware configuration :
-----------------------------
C2D T7300
2Go RAM
GeForce 8600M GS
WiFi chip : 4965AGN
RJ45 Ethernet chip : [dunno]

Note : And a 'lspci' returns only one "Ethernet controller".

[Monkeh]

Could you provide the output of lspci -v?

[Sir Bedevere]

Oops, in fact the two interfaces seem to appear, I probably look to quickly at the output ...

[Monkeh]

Well, you're going to have some troubles with that.. It's an Attansic L1 gigabit NIC, the driver for which looks.. iffy.

Assuming that thing has a cardbus slot, I'd pick up a cheap cardbus NIC for it if I were you, for the moment. And get involved with the work on that driver

[Sir Bedevere]

[Monkeh]

It's not totally unsupported, it's a work in progress. And helping out with a driver doesn't require any form of programming, just a whooooole lot of testing.

[Sir Bedevere]

[Sir Bedevere]

I've downloaded and compiled the atl1 driver from sourceforge, and finally, no problem at all, it runs w/o problems. I still lack the WiFi driver, but at least I can connect to the net using my desktop as gateway