I'm running Ubuntu Server 12.04 on a laptop with an Intel NIC (driver e1000e). When I connect the ethernet port to the internet (college network, DHCP) it works out of the box.

Now I'm trying to connect it to a networked USRP (if you want to know what it is). A friend of mine managed to do this in his laptop (running regular Ubuntu 12.04) just by setting up a new Wired connection in the Network Manager with appropriate addresses. However, when I do the same, no wired connections are available.

The output of nmcli -p dev is

===========================================
             Status of devices
===========================================
DEVICE     TYPE              STATE        
-------------------------------------------
wlan0      802-11-wireless   connected
eth0       802-3-ethernet    unavailable  

but the cable is connected to the device and the device is powered up.

Any idea how to solve this?

UPDATE:

After stopping the network-manager service, setting up the connection manually and starting the service again, it now detects the ethernet connection. However, the device still can't receive data and doesn't answer to pings.

UPDATE 2: As suggested I tried using a cross over cable but the result is exactly the same. However, I found out that connecting the device to the dock (as opposed to directly to the laptop) works fine. I know that the ethernet port in the laptop works fine, because connecting to the network through it works. Is it possible that the port in the laptop doesn't support Gb Ethernet (because that's what the device requires) but the one in the dock does?