getting slackware 12 online

i've been using slack with essentially the same hardware for years and it's always worked like a champ. now with the move to sysfs/udev on slack 12 i've run into a really odd problem from a stock install that, for the life of me, i can't figure out. after install and reboot it gets to the part where it tries to poll my isp's dhcp server (clearwire) and gave an odd error.

Polling for DHCP server on interface eth0:
No carrier detected on eth0. Reducing DHCP timeout to 10 seconds.

after which nothing happened. i'm new to sysfs/udev so i did some research and the 'no carrier' part means that it thinks the cat5 to my ethernet card is unplugged which i assure you it isn't. i wondered why it would think that so i did a little more digging and found that it reads the file /sys/class/net/eth0/carrier to determine the status. thing is there's nothing in the file and it actually seems to be corrupt.

# file carrier
carrier: ERROR: cannot read `carrier' (Invalid argument)

but i can read all of the other net/eth0/ files:

# file mtu
mtu: ASCII text
# file broadcast
broadcast: ASCII text

opening it with vim also gives ominous errors:

"/sys/class/net/eth0/carrier" [readonly][READ ERRORS] 0L, 0C

so i'm at a complete loss now. i can't figure out why carrier would be corrupt and empty and why it won't get a dhcp ip lease considering it still waits 10 seconds just in case the problem is with sysfs/udev and the cable actually is plugged in. the card is a 3Com PCI 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx using the 3c59x driver that i've been using for years.

~clay
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Received on Thu Jul 19 13:44:26 2007