networking disabled on laptop running ubuntu 16.10

[Colin Law]

On 10 November 2016 at 16:38, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> On 2016-11-10 16:17, Liam Proven wrote:
>
>> On 10 November 2016 at 13:37, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>> Connect a USB Ethernet or Wifi adaptor and do a full system upgrade?
>>
>> Also, upgrade your firmware, if possible?
>>
>
> Hi Liam,
>
> First, a sincere, general question: upgrading firmware doesn't hurt, of
> course,
> but WHY should it make a difference in this specific case, where everything
> still works fine under windows, and (afair, at least) no upgrade was done
> that could
> have caused settings to be messed up?
>

I have more than once fixed a problem by upgrading mother board firmware
even when the release notes for the upgrade did not seem to bear any
relation to the problem experienced. The fact that the problem appeared
following a s/w upgrade does not mean it will not be fixed by upgrading the
firmware. Perhaps the kernel uses an interface in a different way and that
is causing he problem. If you mess around for ages and then finally upgrade
the firmware and that fixes it you will feel a bit silly. That is exactly
what happened to me on one occasion. My philosophy is that if there is
something that you know is fixable (and there would not be an upgrade to
the firmware unless it fixes *something*)  and it is fairly easy to do then
do it.

>...

>
> About the full system upgrade: even if a USB ethernet or wifi
> adaptor would be detected by a system currently broken as this,
> I'm afraid is not a viable option. For family reasons this machine
> can't be moved from home right now, but at home we have only a VERY slow
> instable connection. Fetching the necessary packages or any other files
> from another computer/place,
> and then feeding them to this laptop via an USB drive is doable though.
>

Again I think you really must do this. Particularly as you think an upgrade
may have caused the problem. Perhaps there was a problem and it has now
been fixed and a new release made. Again you will feel silly if you do not
do this and eventually discover that an upgrade did fix it.

In another post you said you had re-typed an error message rather than
copying/pasting. It is far better to copy/paste as sometimes the devil is
in the detail. You can copy from the terminal using Ctrl+Shift+C.

Meanwhile it may be worth looking in syslog at the bootup sequence to see
if there are any networking errors reported.

Colin
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