[SOLVED] Network Interface Missing After Reboot – No enp2s0, Only vmbr0

[Vasi]

Hi, I recently rebooted my Proxmox server, and after the reboot, I can no longer access the web interface or ping external sites.

pveversion - pve-manager/8.3.4/65224a0f9cd294a3 (running kernel - 6.8.12-8-pve)

lspci does show the ethernet controller: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8481 PCI express Gigabit Ethernet Controller

What I Noticed:​

• Running ip a does not show my physical network interface (enp2s0), which previously worked (please find the image below) .
• Instead, it only shows vmbr0 with the assigned static IP.
• My /etc/network/interfaces file still references enp2s0, as it was working before the reboot.
• Running ls /sys/class/net lists lo and vmbr0 and many others, but not enp2s0 .
• ip link show does not list enp2s0 either.
• The network was working fine before the reboot.

I checked if the interface was renamed using ls /sys/class/net, but no new name was found.
Looked for renaming in logs using dmesg | grep -i "renamed" – no results.

Tried manually bringing up enp2s0:

ip link set enp2s0 up
dhclient enp2s0

But gives me No device found.

and lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -i "network" gives me the Realtek adapter with Kernel modules: r8168

How can I get my network interface back?


Some images:

 

[Vasi]

Solution - Looked into the journalctl and there it says, `could not find module by name = r8168`. But I remember I am using r8169 and went back to the /etc/modprobe.d and removed r8168.conf file from that location. And voila, it worked.

 

[used1d]

Solution - Looked into the journalctl and there it says, `could not find module by name = r8168`. But I remember I am using r8169 and went back to the /etc/modprobe.d and removed r8168.conf file from that location. And voila, it worked.

Beginner here.. How did you do that exactly? Having a similar issue..

 

[Vasi]

Beginner here.. How did you do that exactly? Having a similar issue..

You could try journalctl |grep "r8168" to see if you have the could not find module by name = r8168.

If you have a different network driver than r8168, (check using ethtool -i <interface name>), then you navigate to the file /etc/modprobe.d and delete the line which says r8168.conf. Hopefully, that solves the issue.