[NBLUG/talk] "Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0"

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Sat Mar 20 15:45:55 PDT 2010


On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 11:11:42AM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> Every so often, my parents' computer completely fails to connect to
> the network (it may or may not show an IP address for eth0 when I run
> ifconfig), and when I try to bring the network interface up or down, I
> get the following error:
> 
> Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0
> 

Lincoln-

Does it work if you manually load the driver with modprobe?
If so, try manually loading the module for the nic at boot by adding it
to /etc/modules .

If that's not working, see if it works with a rmmod/modprobe cycle.

> However, this time I shut down the computer and left it off overnight,
> and this time it DIDN'T fix the problem.  Which leads to two questions:
> 
> 1. What does that error mean?  2. What could be the root cause?

The inconsistent behavior could be due to how the BIOS initializes
hardware.  I'll bet you could make it come back (temporarily) by resetting
BIOS defaults.  But the best way by far would be to force the correct
module to load before the networking scripts run. You may possibly also
need to blacklist any incompatible driver that loads and grabs the
hardware.

> The computer is running the latest version of Kubuntu, and as of about
> two months ago had all of the updates (obviously I can't easily update
> it now). 

Deja vu (this just came up in another conversation).  Look into the
unattended-upgrades package. Heads up:  It does nothing until it's
configured but it *is* nicely configurable.  See
/usr/share/doc/unattended-upgrades/


-t




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