Installing the networking in Debian

3. Installing the network card in Debian GNU/Linux

Ethernet card

During the base setup, the 3c59x (3COM network card) module was loaded, but the ethernet card did not get detected. In order to connect to the Internet (cable), with every boot, log in as root and type

dhclient

To set Debian to automatically connect to the Internet at boot, edit the /etc/network/interfaces and added these two lines.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

I also set the loopback address on my machine because I would be installing Apache2 webserver later on. So, I added the following lines to /etc/network/interfaces.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

and then to restart the network,

/etc/init.d/network restart

To connect to the Internet manually using eth0, another command is

ifup eth0

To take down the network interface eth0, the command is

ifdown eth0

Last Update: Late 2004