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

[James Miller <jamtat@mailsnare.net>]

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.  From memory, it was something like the new modules
couldn't be configured until after the system was rebooted: somehow the
fact that the running kernel was using modules was going to interfere.
The message made it sound like this generation was going to be done
automatically on next boot (and it was pretty stern about warning me to
reboot).  I took that advice: however, also in the wake of the
dist-upgrade there was a lilo problem.  I've got sort of a complex boot
menu, and decided I'd need to get in there and hand-edit it.  I did.
But, as fate would have it, I made a minor goof-up and couldn't fully boot
when I sent the system down (the initrd.img symlink wasn't pointing to the
right initrd.img).  But I did manage to reboot with the old kernel after
the new one rebooting failed and to straighten out that mistake.  It was
at that point that I spotted the fearful message "eth0 ERROR while getting
interface flags: no such device."  And, sure enough, there was no net
connection.  And there was no process automatically running to straighten
out whatever module problem had occured in the dist-upgrade.  Tried
booting a yet older kernel, but with the same eth0 error.  Thinking maybe
the card had gone south, I booted Knoppix (can someone send that guy a
purple heart or something?).  eth0 came up fine under Knoppix.  I ran
lsmod there to see what modules my NIC is using.  Booted back to the
dist-upgraded Debian, modprobed those modules and ran ifup -a - and here I
am on the 'net again.  But this is obviously not the real solution to the
problem.  This has all been a long-winded preface to the question: what
the heck I gotta do to get my NIC modules back to loading on boot? Am I
gonna run into other module problems as well?  What's the way to start
this process that gets the module loading routine working as it should be?
I think there was a reference to modules.dep or maybe modules.conf in that
message I saw during dist-upgrade.  But there was definitely nothing there
telling me how I could manually start the process that couldn't finish
during dist-upgrade.  Any pointers, please?

Thanks, James

PS Most of the above refers to having booted using the new kernel (2.6.6,
though some of those boots were with the old 2.6.5 kernel and one was even
with the 2.4.22 kernel).  None of those were able to use eth0 and gave the
same error message during the boot process.
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