Dirk-Jan's log

Server upgrade

Dirk-Jan -

This week I decided it was time to upgrade my home server. The main reasons, lack of 64-bit support and virtualization technology (VT-x) in my existing setup. The performance gain was also a nice side effect. I have come up with the following new components:

  • Intel DQ67EPB3, S1155, Q67, 2xDDR3, mITX
  • Intel Core i3-2120T, 2.60GHz, 3MB, HD2000, S1155
  • Kingston ValueRam 8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz CL9

The Intel motherboard claims to be energy efficient and the i3 processor has a max thermal design power (TDP) of 35W. I think this is a nice balanced setup to do low-end virtualization with low-power consumption in mind. I might do a power consumption measurement one day.

Once all was installed and the new system booted it appeared networking did not come up in Debian 5 (Lenny).

I had to download and build the driver manually, see the instructions below:

lspci showed: Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Device 1502 (rev 04)

Look for the “Intel® 82579 Gigabit Ethernet Controller” on the http://downloadcenter.intel.com website.

tar xvzf e1000e-1.9.5.tar.gz
cd e1000e-1.9.5/src
make install
modprobe e1000e
ifconfig eth0 up

UPDATE: The network driver works out of the box with Debian Squeeze and as of today (20130706) I can confirm it works on Debian Wheezy to0.