Re: Upgraded to unstable - lost network connectivity

[Simon Kitching <simon@ecnetwork.co.nz>]

On Sat, 2004-06-05 at 15:42, dircha wrote:
> Simon Kitching wrote:
> > I recently added unstable to my sources.list, and did a dist-upgrade.
> > After some mucking around, I now have a working system again - except
> > for networking.
> 
> > Does anyone have any ideas how I can get network connectivity back
> > again? Where might I start diagnosing this problem?
> 
> You sound like someone who has probably thought of this as the possible 
> cause of the problem, but did you upgrade your kernel as well?
> 

Nope. 

> Or even if you have not upgraded your kernel, but if the kernel driver 
> for your nic was compiled as a module, have you checked whether the 
> module is being loaded (lsmod), and if so, is it?

Bingo! Running "lsmod" in the working vs non-working config shows that a
whole bunch of drivers are no longer being loaded after the
dist-upgrade. Running modprobe to force the network drivers to be loaded
restores network connectivity.

Thanks, dircha!

So the question now is: why did dist-upgrade from testing to unstable
mess around with the list of modules that are loaded at boot time?
That's sort of a rhetorical question; I don't hugely care as I now have
a working system [at least I can manually force the necessary drivers to
be loaded on boot]. But presumably other people will be bitten by this
too...

Presumably the list of modules to load on boot is just a config file
floating around somewhere like in /etc. Or is it dynamically determined
during booting [in which case the dynamic detection has been broken]?


Cheers,

Simon