Help; apt-get kills system, networking broken..

[Gregory Guthrie <guthrie@mum.edu>]

Help.

I am running Debian 2.2, with upgrade to WOody from debian.org via
FTP.

I have been running well for over 5 months without reboot(!) or
maintenance.

I went to fetch a new package, and my system decided it wanted to get 108
MB of updates. It failed on a bunch of them, I tried again, and again,
and then a force (-f) optin as suggested by apt-get.

Perl seems to have kludged itself..

Anyway, it seemed to run fine, SO I didn't worry too much.. Then I was
trying to connect to a different network segment, and ran:
   /etc/inetd/networks -restart

and it failed; reporting:
   ifup /etc/network/interfaces Function not implemented
   Could not read interfaces file:
/etc/networks/interfaces
Of course, the file is there, readable (544), and fine.

Any call to "ifup -a" gave this result.

I tried to reboot (big mistake, since networking was running fine then),
but now boot gives the same error, and networking does not even start
(above error).

Now, I am stuck, networking doesn't work, so I can't even get my stuff
off of the machine to start over and rebuild.

Help!

--------------------------------------------------------
Gregory Guthrie
guthrie@mum.edu         (641)472-1125    Fax: -1103
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