June 8, 2009 - Karmic Server and Ethernet Fix

Upon installing Alpha 1 of Karmic Server, I faced a unique problem in that it was unable to connect to the internet.

Matt told me to use the following tools to diagnose the problem:

lspci (to look for a working Ethernet controller)
modprobe (to make sure the module is installed correctly)
ifconfig (to read actual network interface info)

From lspci's output, I could tell that there was an Ethernet controller installed.

Unfortunately, I still couldn't connect to the internet, and ifconfig showed only the loopback device as functioning.

I looked in /etc/network/interfaces to see if eth0 initialized and, from its contents, I had a sneaking suspicion that it had not:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

I added the following lines underneath:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Everything works fine now. Sweet...