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gigabit unhappy

From Steven

Answered By Ben Okopnik

Hey All,

We are running Red Hat Linux on a Compaq ML570 with four Xeon processors and one gigabyte of RAM. The server has two NIC cards, one compaq gigabit card and one 3com 100Mbs card. After some help from all of you, I have been able to successfully install and configure both NIC cards. However, I have found that after one hour of use, the gigabit card loses all connectivity, however, the 3com card stays up fine. We have tested this scenario several times, and the gigabit card is definitely dropping connectivity after about an hour. The only way to bring it back is to reboot the box, in which case they both work fine, but only for about an hour, then the gigabit loses connectivity again.

I checked out the Compaq website for a new driver, and there was one available, however, when I tried to build it with the 'make install' command from the created directory which contained the Makefile, I received an error message stating that he Kernel Source was not available. I took a look at the Makefile, and saw it was calling a 'linux' directory in /usr/src/ however, all I have is a 'redhat' directory in /usr/src/. I copied the contents of the 'redhat' directory to a new directory called 'linux' and still I had the same problem.

I am running out of ideas, and was hoping someone out there might have run into this problem before, either with multiple NICS or with Compaq RPMS.

Any info would really help!

Thanks, Staven

[Ben] It sounds like precisely what the error says: the kernel source is not available (and kudos to Compaq for making the error that clear; I've seen some absolutely st00pid error messages.) You're compiling a module (Linux doesn't use "drivers", at least not in the Wind*ws sense); modules get pushed onto the kernel, effectively modifying how the OS itself does Stuff. Therefore, you need to have the source code - module compilation depends on it.

Run "uname -r" to find out what version you're running. Download and install that version's source tree on your system; this will go under "/usr/src" as "kernel-source-<version>". Create a symlink called "linux" under "/usr/src" that points to your newly-installed source tree:

ln -s /usr/src/kernel-source-<version> /usr/src/linux

You should be able to run your "make" from here on.

(Obviously, you should delete your current "/usr/src/linux" before any of this - taking wild guesses of that sort can get you in trouble.)

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