up and running

Yesterday I finally managed to get the NIC running. After the umpteenth building of the kernel, rebooting with the robot - and failing miserably.

One of the main problems was the lack of a working keyboard on the robot itself. Thus I had to resort to the following procedure for creating new kernels & configs:

1. plug the HD into my office PC
2. do whatever I intended to do
3. halt the machine
4. remove the HD, plugging it into the robot
5. reboot
6. fail miserably
7. goto 1.

At some point I became desperate and decided to attach a USB-controller to the robot. It even has ports on-board, but not as common USB ports - they need an extra cable.

When booting a standard distro kernel (added complexity: not having a working keyboard means there is only one kernel to boot - the default one....), I got USB-support, and thus finally access to the machine.

After reading some logfiles, I finally stumbled over this. I didn't realize that there is a

/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

that pins the NIC to a certain MAC-address. And because of the exchange of the HD, of course my PC's NIC has a different one, resulting in the Robot's NIC being assigned (and of course not configured) to eth1 instead of eth0.

Ok. Finally sorted that one out...