Re: net (& module, I guess) problems after dist-upgrade

James Miller
2004-06-14T15:01:08Z

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Ray Olszewski wrote:

> At 05:36 PM 6/12/2004 -0500, James Miller wrote:
> >Well, I took your advice and dist-upgraded Ray. Now I know why I was not
> >very anxious to do it :). A problem occured with kernel modules during
> >the dist-upgrade. <snip>
>
> OK. This general description is pretty hard to follow. I imagine you were
> pretty upset when you wrote it. If you want help with the general problem
> you experienced, you'll need to repost a more exact description.

I dunno about upset, but tech burnout maybe? Well, let me try to add a
few things, even though I don't make any claims to exactness with it.
This dist-upgrade involved installing a new kernel, as you may recall.
With the new kernel come new modules, right? Beyond this, I'd have to
just guess how things work, but my guess is that the system needs to be
told or figure out somehow which of the new modules the system is using so
that these can be loaded when the machine boots with the new kernel too.
Doesn't this make some sense (bearing in mind that not everything that
makes sense is always true, of course)? That's sort of a deduction from
the error message I got during the dist-upgrade (you get various dialogues
asking you questions and sometimes informational or error messages from
apt, as you surely know, right?) involving kernel modules and the little
bit I know about the way the Linux system operates. Somehow a
configuration involving kernel modules couldn't complete during
dist-upgrade, and I was warned I'd need to reboot for it to complete. I
didn't write anything down, so I'm recalling this from memory. But maybe
there's some sort of hardware autodetection that's supposed to take care
of this module configuration? How 'bout some help here, Ray? I honestly
don't know how this all works: too many possibilities for my rather
unlearned mind to work it out. I'm hoping that, based on the sketchy
information I can give, someone with a much better understanding of these
matters is going to be able to spot some problem, or potential problem,
and be able to make some suggestions. This much does seem clear to me:
there was an error message involving kernel modules during dist-upgrade,
and upon rebooting (the initial boot with the new kernel failed owing to a
minor error I put in lilo.conf), sure enough, some important modules are
not getting loaded (e.g., my NIC module[s]). Does that additional
information help? Please feel free to ask further questions: I really am
not certain exactly what information is needed since I poorly understand
the problem. I'm taking a sort of "scatter gun approach" and recounting
everything, in broad terms, that seems relevant to me.

> But the immediate problem is getting the NIC module(s) to load during
> boot/init . To accomplish that, add the name(s) of the module(s) to
> /etc/modules . One of the init scripts (I forget which one) will modprobe
> every module in /etc/modules, in the order in which they appear there.

I do know about /etc/modules and have added things there before. However
there is currently no module for my NIC indicated there, and there never
has been. Yet somehow previously that NIC module(s) was getting loaded.
This suggests to me that there is some other problem: something got
changed that used to load the NIC modules by, apparently, some other means
than /etc/modules. Shouldn't I be trying to restore whatever got changed?

> The problem you are encountering **may** be an outdated or incomplete
> listing of module dependencies. If you modprobe'd each invidivually and in
> the right order, you simply bypassed this problem in your hand install. The
> way to get this cleaned up is to run "depmod -a", which will rebuild the
> appropriate modules.dep file. The init script I referred to above -- I
> checked and it is /etc/init.d/modutils -- is supposed to do this for you
> during init.

The only modprobing I did was for NIC modules - this because I had no 'net
connection when the machine booted up (that holds for all 3 kernels I
tried booting with: 2.4.22; 2.6.5 and 2.6.6). Once I modprobed the
modules I had identified (with the help of Knoppix) as being associated
with my NIC and issued ifup -a, I got an IP offer from my DHCP server and
was online. There were some entries in the resulting text that I had
never seen before (reference to "sit0") so I'll append that below.
Anyway, I've just tried tried depmod -a and then rebooted the machine but
the NIC modules still seem not to get auto-loaded on boot: I have no 'net
connection when the system finishes booting. Previously (previous to the
dist-upgrade I did a couple of days ago) when I would boot the machine the
NIC was brought up during boot, despite the fact that no entries in
/etc/modules were specifying NIC modules at that time. So, I understand
that I can probably get those modules to load by adding them to
/etc/modules, but it seems to me better to try and determine why they were
"autoloading" before, but are not now. Think I should add those modules
to /etc/modules anyway?

I apologize if this is not as coherent as you'd like. I do not fully
understand how the system works and thus what the problem could be - which
is why I'm asking for help here. Any incoherency has probably much to do
with my poor understanding of the matters with which I'm dealing. I'm
sorry, but I just can't change that overnight.

James

----------BEGIN IFUP -A OUTPUT----------------------------------------
[09:20:59]root@computer$ modprobe 8139too
[09:21:10]root@computer$ modprobe mii
[09:21:17]root@computer$ modprobe crc32
[09:21:27]root@computer$ ifup -a
ifup: interface lo already configured
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Client 2.0pl5
Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 The Internet Software Consortium.
All rights reserved.

Please contribute if you find this software useful.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/dhcp-contrib.html

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Listening on LPF/eth0/00:e0:4c:82:a1:53
Sending on LPF/eth0/00:e0:4c:82:a1:53
Sending on Socket/fallback/fallback-net
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.1.1
DHCPREQUEST on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.1.1
bound to 192.168.1.13 -- renewal in 302400 seconds.
----------------END IFUP -A OUTPUT--------------------------------