Last update: 17 march 2022.
In order to have a wired ethernet connection available under GLLFSC, I recommend you follow the following steps.
First, you have to find the model of your ethernet card:
lspci | grep -i ethernet
For Dell Optiplex 745, the result of the previous command is:
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme \ BCM5754 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
To make your ethernet card work, you need to compile the corresponding driver with the kernel Linux, built-in or as a module. To know which driver of the kernel corresponds to your ethernet card, I encourage you to browse http://h-node.org/ethernetcards/catalogue/en. My search with BCM5754 informs me that this card uses the free driver tg3.
In general, the network interface for a wired connection is named eth0. You may need to activate this interface:
ifconfig eth0 up
If you have chosen to use DHCPCD, dynamic IP attribution to eth0 is done with:
dhcpcd eth0
If ifconfig hangs, try to reinstall inetutils.
To connect to the internet, I wrote a script named connect.sh under /bin with the following content:
# Exit on error: set -e ifconfig eth0 up dhcpcd eth0 exit 0