Re: [debian] Re: whereami, hibernate & ifconfig

[Tony Godshall <togo@of.net>]

> ...  (Incidentally, I've also had
> ifplugd completely freeze my laptop for somewhere around 10 minutes if I
> make the mistake of removing the ethernet cable immediately _before_
> shutting down the computer)....

Hi.

I also use a Dell with a b44 chip (mine's an Insprion 8600).

After a couple years of running well, except for taking 10
seconds to settle down, it started to give me errors on the 
console (something about interrupts) and then freezing the
machine would hard-lock after a few minutes.

Thinking there was some issue with the kernel I'd installed,
I tried going back to a 2.4 kernel, and then thinking there
was some issue with having recently dist-upgraded to sid,
etc., I reinstalled, which turned out to be dumb, because
even having gone back, it still started giving me errors and
locking up, *but only when the ethernet cable was plugged in*.

Aha!  So I dug out my old PCMCIA ethernet cards and USB
ethernet adapter, went through them to find the ones that
still worked, and am back in business.  I'll send the laptop 
in for Dell to fix it some day before my extended warranty 
expires, but for now it would be very hard to live without 
its 150dpi display.

So, anyhow, the moral of the story is this:

Don't be too quick to blame software.

T



PS: I used to use whereami too, but went back to a
config based on /network/interfaces and a little custom
mapping script.  which, by the way, let me put a timeout
for the b44 to settle down.  And it's based on
iputils-arping, which is lightning fast when it detects...

  arping -D -f -c4 -w5 -I$iface $ip

...and works without coming up on the network with an ip
address (i.e. it's less disruptive).