Raspberry Pi Zero Ethernet Problem

Question

I'm having trouble connecting my Raspberry Pi zero to ethernet.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 and four Raspberry Pi zeros. I'm a grad student in mathematics and I do a whole lot of parallel computing. I'm trying to set these up as a cluster to test my distributed code before I send it up to the university's very expensive computing cluster. I bought a handful of uxcell ethernet to micro USB adapters that you can find here: Amazon.com: uxcell Micro USB to RJ45 Network Card Adapter Converter for Windows 98SE Me: Computers & Accessories

When I plug ethernet into the Pi zero using this cable, the Pi zero is not being assigned an IP address. Is this adapter incorrect? I was hoping to use these cheap adapters as the grad student stipend isn't exactly CEO pay . As an additional note, plugging the ethernet directly into the Pi 3 works fine. The Pi 3 instantly recognizes the ethernet and has no problem connecting to the network.

I have tried using ip link and dhcpcd to get the network going on the Pi Zeros, but i'm stuck as I can't get them to recognize the LAN. I'm also positive that it isn't an issue with the router as I have used multiple routers (at home and at the university) and neither has worked. Thank you in advance for your replies.

clem57 · Accepted Answer

Oh my gosh, I see the problem: they all have the same mac address 00:e0:4c:53:44:58 from Amazon.com: uxcell Micro USB to RJ45 Network Card Which means the Chinese did not care to imprint unique ones for each adapter. I hope you can complain to where you got these. Clem

Problemchild · Answer

Yes you are right Shabaz... That said if you want to do something like this you would be better off spinning up a few VM's on your Laptop or what ever than getting all the Zeros involved and thus saving you the Networking costs if y ou are trying to save cash

Problemchild · Answer

Um, yeah some rely on the fact it's unlikely that some one will have a load of these modules Any way before you rush off you can try setting the MAC manually which may be easier than sending the whole lot back Check the manuals but the command will be something like ifconfig eth0 hw ether <mac address> obviously as root set the MACs to different values and you should be OK Also you will need this to run each time you boot or insert the NIC

shabaz · Answer

That is normal, because most likely your home network is something like 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x and you can't connect something with 10.0.0.x to it (assuming you're plugging into the switch-ports on the back of your router). Something else is setting this (your /etc/network/interfaces file is set up to allow this), what do you observe if you use the desktop GUI to access the wireless network settings? Also, by the way, this is quite an inefficient way to perform parallel processing (anything else would be cheaper, even a single Pi 3 with 4 x Pi 3 cores are cheaper than 4 x (Pi zero+USB-Eth+SDcard), and better performing, but I'm guessing there is reasons for it.