Red Hat 8 no network

[dexter86]

Hello, we have an old desktop in our company that is running 24/7 with Red Hat 8. I moved it to our Virtualbox host like I moved two other machines. I used standard procedure to move it: create hdd image with dd (from livecd of course), convert it to vdi using "vboxmanage convertdd", create new virtual guest (select correct type, for this one Red Hat 32bit) and attach that vdi. During boot I see error "Bringing up interface eth0: eepro100 device does not seem to be present, delaying eth0 initialization [FAILED]" and after boot only loopback interface is present. I tried every Adapter type with no success. lspci shows whatever adapter type is chosen, it's just that Red Hat doesn't load drivers for it. Previously it was running on Intel D845GLAD with Pentium 4. VirtualBox host is Ubuntu Server 12.04 with 2x Xeon E5335 & Intel S5000PSL. I don't have any experience working with red hat and can't finding anything on Google since it so old.

[andyp73]

The error message from Red Hat as it boots stating that "eepro100 device doesn't seem to be present" relates to the fact that the Linux kernel can't find an Intel 82557 or 82559 100Mbps Ethernet card as was installed in the physical hardware.

The Red Hat kernel is going to need to be reconfigured (either recompiled or the modules it loads being changed) to use either the e1000 kernel driver with the VM configured with one of the Intel adapters or a pcnet driver and the VM configured with one of the AMD network cards.

Red Hat 8 is well over a decade old, and according to Wikipedia running a 2.4.18 kernel, so I have no idea whether it supports the e1000 devices so your better option is probably likely to be with the AMD cards (probably PCnet-PCI II).

Andy.

[dexter86]

Yeah, it's so old, that's why I didn't want to "touch" anything, especially recompiling kernel, it's something I haven't done before. Thanks for your help.

[andyp73]

As I had the ISOs for Red Hat 8 kicking around I have installed it into a new VM under VirtualBox 5.0.10 configured with a single AMD PCnet-PCI II network adapter in bridged mode. According to the output of dmesg then I get the following from the default kernel:

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[root@localhost root]# dmesg | grep pcnet
pcnet32.c:v1.27a 10.02.2002 tsbogend@alpha.franken.de
pcnet32: PCnet/PCI II 79C970A at 0xd020, 08 00 27 c8 39 7e assigned IRQ10
pcnet32: 1 cards_found

Assuming you are using the standard RH8 kernel then you should see the same output. I think you will need to edit the file /etc/modules.conf and change:

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alias eth0 eepro100

to

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alias eth0 pcnet32

Reboot and see how it goes...

Good luck!

Andy.

[dexter86]

Awesome, it works Thank you!

[andyp73]

No worries. Glad to be able to help!