Offline install of Realtek 8168 drivers?

JayB21

New Member
Apr 12, 2025
9
1
3
I'm running ProxMox 8.4.14 on a Gigabyte B550 MB with a single onboard Realtek 8168 NIC and a single PCI slot which is occupied by a video card until I can get the network configured and then I'll add a 10GB Intel dual nic which was installed and working before the swap.

I recently tried to swap the gigabyte for an ASUS board to allow for an additional NIC but ran into PCI passthrough issues causing crashes so reverted to the original board.

The NIC -was- working before the switch but since I switched it back, the NIC isn't working. I assume something I did while trying to configure the new MB borked something.

The card is seen by lspci and lshw

The 8168 is showing as UNCLAIMED and can't be assigned an IP and has no loaded drivers.

Because the drivers aren't working, I've got no network connection and I've had to do what I can via USB with files from my desktop.

I tried to install the latest drivers from Realtek (8.055) but they require dkms 3.2 which isn't apparently compatible with bookworm.

I tried to install the 8.051.02 drivers via dkms on USB and that went fine (no errors at least) but made no apparent difference.

lspci reports the controller at 05:00 and

Code:
find /sys/ | grep drivers.*05:00

returns nothing so no driver?

I've spent the last day & a half trying all the fixes I can find from here as well as elsewhere and nothing has worked..

I've seen that there may be a need for a header update but not sure how to do that via USB.

Thoughts?