Network Fixed

One thing that appeals to me about open software movements like the Hurd is the team development. IRC is a traditional method of communication on the internet--something like a very basic chat protocol. I have used IRC several times before, but usually with poor results. Often the channel is completely empty or no one wants to talk about anything related to the channel topic. But like bug-hurd, I have enjoyed the feedback from the Hurd group.

On this particular night, I jumped on and asked some questions about the e-mail I sent assuming most people on the IRC channel also followed the bug-hurd mailing list. After getting a few e-mails back saying that it worked fine for them, I found two people that gave me a few ideas of how to fix it. First, they never used any flags for qemu--the default NIC always functioned fine. This led us to believe my OS (Ubuntu 7.10) provided some wacked configuration of qemu.

Just for kicks, I ran it through kvm with no flags. I started out checking to see if my eth0 was established.

~# devprobe eth0
eth0

That's a good start. Whatever configuration kvm uses obviously didn't need any NIC flags. Starting up pfinet didn't give any errors either. Usually I use ping to check my network connection, but since that was installed yet, I tried a simple apt-get update. After a few seconds, the files started rolling in. Network connection!

I thanked the two guys on IRC and posted my solution on bug-hurd. I figure the next time someone has that problem, it will be documented in some mailing archive (if it wasn't already...).