Bug#531172: upgrade-reports: Compiled realtek drivers and blacklisted builtin drivers caused no ethernet after the upgrade.
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: important
With Debian Etch installed on a Dell Vostro 220, the builtin realtek r8169 drivers did not work for the 8168 builtin pci-express card.
To make it work, I had to compile the r8168 drivers from the realtek website and blacklist the builtin r8169 drivers.
After upgrading to Lenny, the compiled drivers were not used due to the new kernel and the builtin ones were still blacklisted.
The PC therefore had no recognizable ethernet port and unfortunately it was at a remote location, so it had to be retrieved.
Admittedly if I had known more about how linux / Debian work I might have realised this could happen, but I think it still could happen to others
and could be avoided.
I'm happy to report that the builtin r8169 drivers do work in Lenny, so it wasn't too much work to fix, but I do think this is a little gotcha
which others might be able to avoid.
I wonder if having the module blacklist files in a kernel version location would stop this happening again? - i.e. if modules are only
loaded per kernel version, then perhaps so should the module blacklists.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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