10.1 Do you have a network device?

The first order of business is to make sure a server host does have a network interface. Depending on the hardware configuration, there are a few ways to find the network interface.

Most modern servers use a PCI based network interface card (NIC). Even though some motherboards include built-in NICs in the chipsets, the NICs still appear as if they are connected to the PCI bus. As a result, it makes sense to check the PCI bus devices first for a NIC.

The command to do this is lspci. Just using this command without any parameter should provide a fairly complete listing of PCI devices. This is part of the result of running this command on my server:

 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)

Note that the command properly recognizes the NIC manufacturer, model and chip. This is a good sign!

If you do not see a networking device, it is possible that the device is too new to be supported by the kernel. You may want to consider upgrading the kernel.