ifconfig problem

[Michael]

Hi all,

I compiled a new kernel (as some of you may recall) and finally got one working. Everything is well with it but I have one oddball problem. When I use "ifconfig" without specifying an interface I get an error message:

[root@home /root]# ifconfig
: error fetching interface information: Device not found
[root@home /root]#
[root@home /root]# ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:FC:72:E0:5B
inet addr:172.30.1.18 Bcast:172.30.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: 5ffd::18/64 Scope:Global
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:32872 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:21168 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:2785
[root@home /root]#
[root@home /root]# ifconfig -a
: error fetching interface information: Device not found
[root@home /root]#

That's about all I can add, I can produce strace output if anyone is able
to read it.

It works fine with the old kernel. I suspect that there's something about the ifconfig binary so I tried using a newer bin file with no luck. Since "ifconfig" is a simple way of saying "ifconfig eth0; ifconfig eth1; ifconfig eth2; ifconfig lo" and so on, I suspect that there's a place that the interfaces should be registered after a scan of likely interface locations. It seems like those interfaces are not being registered with ifconfig, or, ifconfig is incompatible with the newer kernel (2.4.20 as opposed to 2.4.9).

A strace reveals that it errors on an ioctl call (I think).

This is all guesswork here, I bow to someone's superior knowledge.