8812au VS e1000e-dkms-debian

Guide specifically for RTL8812AU: https://github.com/morrownr/8812au

Hello, Our hardware vendor stopped selling the previous models of our standard desktops and laptops and possess sent the newest models in our latest purchase. Unfortunately, when installing Ubuntu on these machines the NICs are not recognized by the OS and need manual intervention to be updated, which I was able to get going by downloading the appropriate e1000e driver onto a USB and installing from that. Our standard workflow was provisioning the system with Foreman, and configuring it with ansible after the OS was installed. The manual steps now required between these steps have caused delays in setting up new equipment. Getting this hardware to allow PXE in the first place was a pain, I had to take the initrd.gz that foreman provides for the PXE environment, unpack it and replace the e1000e network driver with the very latest one to even allow the PXE process to start. But because the archive foreman uses for Ubuntu is the standard Canonical hosted Ubuntu archive, the OS is again missing that version of the driver and it needs to get updated again. Does anyone have recommendations on how to get around this? * I tried using HWE but it seems to not include this very latest version of e1000e so had no luck there * Could this process be included in the preseed file/provisioning template to handle the driver? * Our foreman install has Katello, but I have been having a hell of a time getting deb repos hosted. Even if that gets set up properly, it seems pretty‍ hacky again to insert a kernel with the correct driver version. (GPG issues? idk) * Foreman/Katello docs are lackluster and havent seen anything related to this kind of problem * FYI the desktop is a Dell Precision Tower 3650 and installing Ubuntu 18.04 I was hired as a Junior Sys Admin 2 years and now find myself as the sole IT in the company, this has been driving me nuts as my previous provisioning workflow was pretty solid but dont have anyone internal to turn to for advice. Would really appreciate any thoughts or ideas you all have or any resources you know of I can look into. Thanks! EDIT: Thanks for the replies everyone, I ended up getting this resolved by using DKMS. https://github.com/koljah-de/e1000e-dkms-debian was a good starting point, I built a deb from that and placed it on my tftp server. Then in Foreman's finish template I included the following lines: tftp -m binary tftp.example.com -c get e1000e-dkms.deb dpkg -i e1000e-dkms.deb That worked for me, after the installation process the NIC was usable. Plus this has the added benefit of not needing to tweak the drivers after upgrading the kernel at a later date.

Intel out-of-tree NIC drivers too; https://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/ - But there are not many!

[1] qemu/hw/net/e1000.c [2] Devices supported by Linux's e1000 [3] e1000 from Intel