Sunday, September 25, 2011

more network fun

Looks like we had another random network outage around 4am PDT this morning, which I discovered when I came back from my sleep study around 8am. I also took advantage of the opportunity to try the reboot I said I was going to do at the end of the last message but never quite got to that day, and yay, it's getting the right network driver now, so no more worries about reboots that happen when I'm away from the house (or, at least, not because of this issue).

(Note to self: when changing things under /lib/modules, don't forget to rerun depmod.)

Sunday, September 18, 2011

fun with network drivers

Well, that was fun

We do what appears to be a routine upgrade (of Debian 6.0.0 to 6.0.2) and on reboot it decides eth0 (a.k.a. The Network Interface That Matters) doesn't exist anymore. Just in case you were wondering why we didn't come back right away after that shutdown today . . .

Note to self for future reference: kernel modules installed in /lib/modules/<version>/updates will take precedence over everything else and won't get overwritten by kernel upgrades (knock wood), which is what you need to do when a module that comes with the stable kernel (like, say, e1000e.ko) happens to be broken and you need to override it with a version that actually works.

I'm going to need to try another reboot later tonight just to make sure this is working the way I think it is (lie)