Ubuntu

No network after Gutsy upgrade or reinstall; live cd works fine

Asked by Stephen Clibbery

Hi. I upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy a week ago. I previously had no network problems of any kind. After the upgrade, I had no network connection. Requests for a dhcp lease were failing, and using a static ip made no difference. I could not even ping the router. After reading lots of apparantly similar problems online, I tried everything I could find, such as restarting networking, running 'ifdown'/'ifup' or 'dhclient' from the terminal etc, all to no avail. Once, a few minutes after booting, I did get a connection and everything was fine; however after a reboot the connection was gone again, never to return.

Today, I burned a Gutsy live cd to try a full reinstallation. While in the live cd, the network worked fine, including full internet access (great, I though, a reinstall will fix it!). However, after the installation, I was back to square one, exactly the same as after the upgrade, with no network connection.

With the default setup as it was after the Gutsy install, I get 'network unreachable' trying to ping the router by its ip address. If I look in 'ifconfig', then eth0 is present but has no ip address. If I turn off roaming in network manager, set the connection to dhcp, and then use dhclient to try and claim an ip address, it gets no response to its attempts to broadcast for a lease (whether or not I ifdown the interface first). If I set a static ip address in network manager (or from the terminal), then I get 'destination host unreachable' trying to ping the router, even though ifconfig tells me the static ip is correctly assigned to eth0. I haven't touched /etc/network/interfaces after this install, but changes to it made no difference before.

I have realtek 8169 onboard networking, and a linksys router. The hardware is all fine; I'm writing this from the dual-boot windows on the same machine, and the live cd worked fine too.

This is very frustrating. Any suggestions?

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marcobra (Marco Braida)
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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

Please try to disable the load of ipv6 protocol, it may help you:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16335

HTH

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Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#2

Hi, Thanks for the suggestion. I actually tried that before the reinstall, having found it on a forum; unfortunately it made no difference. I have just tried it again now, with the same result. The situation is unchanged, I still have no connection to the network from Gutsy.

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#3

Have you check in the usual system log for messages ( like irq conflict or related to your nic ) :

dmesg | less

sudo gedit /var/log/messages
sudo gedit /var/log/syslog

have you tried the irqpoll kernel startup option

HTH

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Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#4

Hi, thanks again. I tried irqpoll, but it made no difference. The only interesting stuff I can see in the logs:

Failure registering capabilities with primary security module

r8169: eth0: link down

The first came up twice, once fairly early, and again near the end of boot, but I get the impression its a fairly normal thing..?
The second sounds more relevant: theres no 'link up' message, just the 'link down', but I don't know what to do about it...
I can post full logs etc if that will help.

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#5

Searching for r8190 under https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu
i found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/86798

HTH

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#6

Better
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=r8169&orderby=-importance&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=NEW&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=CONFIRMED&field.status%3Alist=TRIAGED&field.status%3Alist=INPROGRESS&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=

:-(

Revision history for this message
Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#7

Hi, thanks for finding those bug reports. I've looked through all 20 of them, and so far Ive tried the 'acpi=force' kernel switch, using modprobe to remove and put back the driver, and Ive tried a couple of different replacement drivers from the realtek website. Unfortunately, none of the above has made any difference (except that the replacement realtek driver makes the whole machine slow down quite badly :-( ). I guess I can revert to an old version of Ubuntu (I have an Edgy live CD somewhere), but that seems like a bit of a cop out. Is there anything more I can try? And if not, should I file a bug report somewhere or something?

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#8

Try some ethtool config parameters may help:

ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

Then try to compile by yourself the latest
ftp://209.216.61.149/cn/nic/r8168-8.003.00.tar.bz2

Here something related
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22/+bug/114171

Or try to install Windows driver with ndiswrapper...

HTH

Revision history for this message
marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#9

Sorry this is better ftp://209.216.61.149/cn/nic/r8169-6.003.00.tar.bz2

Revision history for this message
Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#10

Hi, I've tried the realtek drivers: all three versions of the r8169 driver and the r8168 one (just in case); no luck. The 8169 driver installs ok, but does not help. The ethtool config didnt help either. I had a go with ndiswrapper, but I couldn't get it to successfully install the windows driver.

Revision history for this message
Best marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#11

Boot with Ubuntu 7.10 live cd and...

try to investigate the kernel release (uname -r) and loaded modules (sudo lsmod) that Ubuntu live cd use.

Then if it don't solve: add and use a different cheap ethernet NIC to your system, i think is the best solution.

Hope This Help

Revision history for this message
marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#12

Or try to compile latest kernel by yourself....

http://www.kernel.org/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile

HTH

Revision history for this message
Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#13

The live cd is using (AFAICT) the same kernel and driver: 2.6.22-14-generic and the 2.2LK r8169 driver. The only difference I can see is that the live cd loaded eth0 onto irq 19, while the install has it on irq 18. In either case it gets shared with a usb port, so there doesn't seem to be much difference between them.

Will have a look at compiling a newer kernel, although it looks like it won't be as easy to do without internet access :(

Revision history for this message
Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#14

Ive solved this by putting in an additional network card. Its also a Realtek (8139 not 8169) but it works fine with no problems. Thanks for all your prompt help and suggestions; sorry I didn't manage to track down the actual problem in the end.

Cheers,
Steve.

Revision history for this message
Stephen Clibbery (sdclibbery) said : 		#15

Thanks marcobra, that solved my question.