Yesterday, while installing a new router, my ethernet connection quit working. This morning, when I plugged the cable back in to troubleshoot, the computer died, and won’t reboot. This is a recent new motherboard. Not even sure how to start troubleshooting.
[Update a few minutes later]
I unplugged the cord from the power supply, plugged it back in, and the machine came back to life. Still no eth0, though.
[Update late morning]
OK, this is making me nuts. I went out to Office Depot, who didn’t stock any PCI-E ethernet cards, but they had a USB wireless dongle for thirteen bucks. I bring it home, plug it into the back of the machine, and the machine dies again. And this time, I don’t seem able to resurrect it.
An exact replacement for the mobo would be $150. But I’m not sure if I want another one.
[Update a while later]
OK, apparently when I was futzing around on the back panel, I was killing the switch on the power supply.
So I’ve plugged in the USB dongle, but the OS isn’t seeing it.
[Afternoon update]
OK, the OS is seeing the dongle, but it won’t connect to my wireless network. It attempts, then drops it.
In better news, I now seem to have a wired connection. The bad news is that I have no DNS. I can only ping by IP, not by domain name.
[Update a while later]
OK, I think I found the problem. Apparently my ExpressVPN account has expired, and it had written its nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf. I changed it to the router IP, and now it’s working (though I’m still getting a question mark on the network connection).
USB wifi adapters and Linux do not work well together, mainly because the most common chipset doesn’t have kernel drivers, and you have to go to silly lengths to get it working.
At least, that was the case earlier this year, the last time I tried it. Believe it or not, some people recommend using an Android phone–you connect it to your wireless router, then plug the USB into your Linux box and turn on USB tethering. (I tried it and it’s actually easier, unless you’ve got a stupid phone (lookin’ at you, Moto G5S+) that doesn’t won’t let you use USB tethering to share a wifi connection, only a cellular one).
I’ve had some computer adventures of my own lately. I had to go into the hospital and had no means of getting online from Oct. 9-25. The only computer I had was a desktop that was at home. My sister and her husband in Texas sent me a laptop, which was nice of them. However, I had never used a laptop or Windows 10 before. The scroll pad made me want to take a flamethrower to the thing, and Windows 10 was an endless source of “WTF was that?” moments.