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CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/21 14:30:25
by kilowatt
I have been using CentOS 6.x on about one dozen HP xw9400 workstations at custom installations for several clients. I stopped using Fedora because of the short support cycle and I grew tired of doing Red Hat's beta testing. I use Fedora on my personal laptop and CentOS on everything else.

This weekend I decided to try out CentOS 7 and was surprised that it could not recognize the NVIDIA ethernet devices! The HP xw9400 is not exactly outdated or unusual; I have one (2xHex-Core) running Windows 8.1 for Visual Studio and two running CentOS 6.5 (both 2xQuadCore) as my office servers. Can anyone tell me why CentOS 7 does not recognize the ethernet controllers?? Why does CentOS 6.x install without a problem and CentOS 7 does not even "see" the network controllers?

Should I wait 6 months?
I am interested in the why as much as how to work around the problem.
My customers and I are small businesses and the refurbished HP xw9400 platform has served everyone well, both for Windows and Linux workstations.

THANKS in advance for anyone's answer.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/21 15:11:45
by TrevorH
Redhat decided to remove forcedeth from el7. ELRepo have it as kmod-forcedeth so that's your best option.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/24 00:41:41
by nigerag
I wonder, what else Red Hat decided to remove? I have two NIC cards on my machine (3Com and Intel) and none of them is being recognized. Apparently, Red Hat removed 3c59x and e100 as well. All these cards worked just fine in previous releases and Fedora.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/24 00:48:26
by TrevorH
Things like that are detailed in the Redhat migration doc https://access.redhat.com/documentation ... index.html

I'm fairly sure that ELRepo have a kmod-59x for 3Com support for el7. I suspect that you might convince them to provide a kmod-e100 if you asked nicely.

Don't forget that el7 is supported until 2024 - who will have 100Mbps network cards then? Didn't know anyone still had them now ;-) I've had gigE at home for about 10 years now.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/24 20:23:54
by nigerag
Thank you for the link, It's quite informative. Sometimes I just forget how old I am - still using old Pentium IV machine and 100Mbps cards. That's was a test machine, all production servers have gig cards. However, there are plenty of desktops having 100Mb cards. But I got your point and it seems very valid.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/28 14:04:06
by hamsoj80
So Centos 7 supports only Gigabit Nics? I was facing the same problem before seeing this information. Many people really still have these types of old nic 100Mbps. So we have to prepare ourselves to throw them

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/28 14:11:56
by TrevorH
No, there are still some 100Mbps devices supported out of the box: 8139too and 8139cp are still there for example. I'm not familiar enough with other 100Mbps chipsets to know what's missing and what isn't. No idea how RH made the decisions to remove the drivers but they were gone in the beta and mostly they stayed gone in the GA.

ELRepo have already made some of the newly unsupported driver available: forcedeth and 3c59x are there though last time I looked e100 was not but maybe that's just because no-one asked yet.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/28 15:47:02
by psoderlund
So given that my fresh install of CentOS 7 cannot see the NVIDIA ethernet contollers and I cannot get to the internet to download anything from the ELRepo how do I fix this problem?

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/28 15:51:48
by TrevorH
Same way as always: you go to ELRepo in a web browser on another system, download kmod-forcedeth and put it on a USB stick and take that to your target system and install it there.

Re: CentOS 7 no network devices

Posted: 2014/07/28 17:44:14
by psoderlund
That did it, thanks! I also had to remove the virbr0 entry in network-scripts and reboot the machine to get it to recognize the ethernet card and setup the networking.