Ethernet Will Not Become Active

[Jathie]

Hello everyone.

Currently I am working at a college as a student worker, and one of the classes that needs to take place requires that Fedora 12 be installed. Now, this isn't greatly important, but so far on a few of the installs I cannot get the Ethernet device to actually become active. I've tried restarting the computer, reinstalling Fedora 12, and going into the actual network area to click on "Activate" but it is grayed out. So currently, a few machines cannot connect to the internet - including the professor station. I'm not entirely sure what to do here, since most other posts I have read reported that they were able to actually click on "Activate" and it would work.

Right now, the computers are connected to the internet. The jacks do work as they were tested with computers that are able to connect to the net themselves. These computers NICs do work too as we have separate hard-drives in them booting into XP, which do connect to the net without problem.

Any help would be appreciated. If anymore information is required, please let me know. I'll do my best to provide you with this information.

Thank you.

[slimerkh]

Hi Jathie. Since nobody else has responded, I thought i'd give it a bash. I've seen this behaviour before, but to my recollection the only way I was able to rectify it was to reboot, and if that failed, perform a clean install. I had to do this once as it seems the original install was broken somehow, maybe because I customised a few packages and apps during the install, rather than leaving it default. I lacked the time or talent to find out exactly why.

Anyway, are these clean installs? I'm also assuming that the NIC is enabled in BIOS as well - might be worth checking. What NIC is it? Go to a shell and type 'lspci | grep Ethernet' and post results here if you're not sure...

Also, are all the PC's identical in spec?

[Jathie]

So far, this problem wasn't solved with a simple reboot unfortunately. A clean install also worked on some computers, but didn't work on some - which was strange because all the CDs we used are identical.

Yes, these are clean installs. It is enabled in BIOS too. As said, the NIC is enabled in a Windows partition but just not on this linux partition. All the time it comes up as inactive with the "Activate" button grayed out. It just won't come up.

"Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM-3 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02)"

Yes, all these computers are same spec. The only one that is different are the regular student lab ones and the professor station one. But even the student computers are having some problems, but some aren't. All jacks are live. All student computers are the same. And as a note again, some student computers work, some don't - having the same problem as the professor station.

[slimerkh]

Hi Jathie
It's interesting - I upgraded my laptop yesterday from F13 to F14 and guess what - NICs (both wired and wireless) didnt work.

I was able to get the wired one working by doing this at the prompt (as root):

service network restart
ifup eth0
sevice NetworkManager restart
NetworkManager up eth0

Remember it's case sensitive. It then started the wired NIC and resolved an IP address from my DHCP server.
Once I had that up, I could do a 'yum update' and updated everything. I then rebooted with the latest kernel, and both my wireless and wired NICs then worked flawlessly in the usual manner with Network Manager in GNOME.

So I think there must be a bug of some sorts lurking, but doing the full system update fixed it.
Hope this helps.