networking disabled on laptop running ubuntu 16.10

[M. Fioretti]

Greetings,

UI have an HP Pavilion g6 running Ubuntu 16.10 alongside
Windows 8.

On Windows, both ethernet and wifi work fine. On Ubuntu, they
worked fine... until a few weeks ago, when they both stopped working
without apparent cause (e.g. sw upgrades). None I can remember, that
is: in fact, since I got on vacation and then did not need the laptop
for a while, I never worked on that problem.

Today I did, and found out that
lspci -k | grep -EA2 'Eth|Net' does list both Wifi chip (Broadcom 
Corporation BCM4313,  and the Ethernet controller (Realtek RFL8101)

but networkctl -a only lists the lo interface, and

/etc/init.d/networking status -l  reports this error (copied manually,
so there may be some typos):

execstartpre=/(bin/sh -c [ "CONFIGURE_INTERFACES" != ] && [ -n 
"$(ifquery --read-environment --list --exclude=lo)" ] && udevadm settle 
(code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

in fact, "ifquery --read-environment --list --exclude=lo" yelds nothing.

I **have** already looked into similar threads like this, for example:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2324354

but found nothing that solves the problem, or helps to find out more.

Thoughts? Thanks,

Marco

-- 
http://mfioretti.com