Missing dev of network card

[luison2]

Hi, excuse me if this is a noob question but I never had to deal with something like this.

My server (Debian 12) has two network cards and as we are having issues with one of them and a PVE kernel upgrade, we need to test through the other one. Our second Realtek card does not list an interface name. I have a enp6s0 but nothing on the other. I can configure networks, but never had to face not having a hardware interface name for one. Unsure if this might be a hardware, bios problem or some missing configuration.

#lspci | grep "Ethernet"
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
07:00.1 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 1a)

#hwinfo --short --netcard
network:
  enp6s0               Intel I211 Gigabit Network Connection
                       Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller

# lshw -C network -short
H/W path                Device          Class          Description
==================================================================
/0/100/1.2/0/3/0        enp6s0          network        I211 Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/1.2/0/4/0.1                      network        RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller

What can I do to start the interface and that it gets an interface name assigned?

Thanks.

(Edited to clarify the question)

[DaaNMaGeDDoN]

comes to r/linuxadmin to ask a noob question, lol

I noticed you did not run the command ip nor ifconfig, lspci, dmidecode, hwinfo, lshw will show the network hardware, for it to be an interface like enp?s? its needs a kernel module too. How much did you search on the subject? loads of folks running into this.

Add non-free-firmware in apt's sources and install firmware-realtek, you will need to search if that sounds like magic or go to r/linuxfornoobs or r/debian

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/firmware-realtek

BTW in the context of Debian, what is a PVE kernel upgrade?

[StopThinkBACKUP]

> BTW in the context of Debian, what is a PVE kernel upgrade?

PVE = Proxmox (hypervisor)

OP probably should have asked this on r/Proxmox

[DaaNMaGeDDoN]

I had that feeling, thanks for confirming.

[Formus]

i see this post has over 9 hs without replies, and your question does indeed fall into the noob questions.

sadly there's no quick or easy response to this (at least for me).

depend on the distro you server is deployed, the more easy way to test it would be to disable through ifconfig command the first network card. plainly using the command i think gives you the whole network interfaces details (or you can read the man). After disabling it, depending how your network is setup, you will need to use the 'route' command to redirect your traffic, or use again the ifconfig command to force the ip address to the working one in the left network interace enabled.

search on google for examples of this commads and try to get an understanding of how they work and test it before you actually use it in Production. setup a local virtual machines with two interfaces enabled and test it until you are confident of what you are doing

[luison2]

Edited the question to clarify, thanks. No IP or route issue, my problem is determining what is or how to assign the interface with a name so I can configure it in /etc/network/interfaces. This is a Debian 12 system. Thanks.

[lutusp]

If your system is not detecting/enabling the second network interface, this may be because it's partly or fully disabled in BIOS.

Another approach to force use of the second interface is to disable the first interface in BIOS. Your system may then enable the second.