Configuring Linux Network Cards

This little guide will introduce you to some commands that can help with troubleshooting network device cards.

First try executing the following to list any network interfaces.

/sbin/ifconfig -a

Eth interfaces are generally ethernet interfaces, but can also be wireless drivers depending on the driver. Lo is the local loopback device, it a device only used by the local machine for IP connections to itself.

If the interface you are looking for is not listed, you will need to identify it and load the correct kernel module, or compile support into the kernel.

lspci -v

This command will list all detected PCI cards. Just because a card is listed here, doesn’t mean that you have kernel support for it, it just means that it has been identified. lspci is very useful for finding out what chipset your card is using, and as a result, what driver to compile/load.

The commands

• dmesg | grep Ethernet
• lspci | grep Ethernet
• ifconfig -a

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