Cannot get ethernet off the ground

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 08:11:00PM -0500, William Gordon Rutherdale wrote:
> I have to use paper-sneakernet because
> - no network connectivity yet
> - tried plugging in a memory stick; it flashed but nothing showed up 
> with the 'mount' command

It won't mount automatically, unless you have the automounter
configured. If you want to mount USB drives as a normal user, you have
to run the command 'sysctl vfs.usermount=1' as root. To make this change
permanent, put 'vfs.usermount=1' in /etc/sysctl.conf.

Next, you have to make a directory to mount it. I would suggest
/mnt/$USER (where $USER is your username). Make sure that _you_ own that
directory.

Next, you'll need read/write access to the devices. I would suggest to
create a group called usb, and make yourself a member of this group. See
pw(8).  With that done, you chould add a rule to /etc/devfs.rules. See
the EXAMPLES in devfs.rules(5).

If all of that is sorted, you should see one or more /dev/daXsY devices
appear when you plug in the USB drive, X and Y being numbers,
e.g. /dev/da0s1. This means first slice [s1] on the first da(4) device [da0].

To mount this device if it is formatted as FAT partition do:

mount_msdosfs -m 644 -M 755 -l -o noatime -o sync -o noexec -o nosuid \
/dev/da0s1 /mnt/$USER

> none2 at pci0:2:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x2abf103c chip=0x816810ec 
> rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
>     vendor          = 'Realtek Semiconductor'
>     device          = 'RTL 8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC'
>     class           = network
>     subclass        = ethernet

This should be recognized by the re(4) driver. This driver is present in
the generic kernel. Are you running a custom kernel? ('uname -i' can
tell you the name of the kernel you are running) If so, try running
'kldload if_re.ko'. The device should then show up as /dev/net/re0.

If this works, you'll have to load the module on the next boot, by
adding 'if_re_load="YES"' to /boot/loader.conf. You will also have to
configure the device in etc/rc.conf. This is covered in the
handbook. You can find the english version at [1]. It is also available
on the FreeBSD site.

If you are running the GENERIC kernel and it does not recognize this
chip, try upgrading to the latest release. If that doesn't work, you
should probably file a problem report with send-pr(1).

Roland

[1: file:///usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html]  
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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