[PLUG] Ethernet suddenly died

[John Jason Jordan]

I was searching on eBay in Fedora 11, and suddenly the ethernet stopped
working on my laptop. Meantime, the desktop computer continued to
stream Radio Clasique from Paris, so it was not the fault of Comcast.
All lights are blinking except the ethernet port on the laptop and the
other end of the cable on the switch. Those lights are lit up, but not
blinking. I have reseated and even changed all the cables, but still no
connection.

On the Gnome panel the network icon has a red x on it. If I click on it
everything is grayed out.

>From the command line ifconfig -a shows the ethernet. But "ifconfig
eth0 up" does nothing.

I have rebooted three times and ethernet is always off when I log in.

>From the command line dhclient executes without error, but accomplishes
nothing. Also, sudo "NetworkManager restart" executes without error,
but there is no change.

Looking at /var/og/messages shows about 30 pages of mesages during
thelast boot. There is a block of half a dozen messages starting with
NetworkManager every so often. Sometimes it appears it is turning the
device off, but then it appears to be connecting, then off again, and
so on. The mesages are written in Geek, so I could not understand them.
For example, the following is typical:

NetworklManager WARN nmsignal_handler() Caught signal 15, shutting down
normally NetworkManager <info> (eth0) now unmanaged
NetworkManager <info> (eth0) device state change 2 -> 1 (reason 36)
NetworkManager <info> (eth0) cleaning up ...
NetworkManager <info> (eth0) taking down device

The next group of messages leads one to think that eth0 is functioning
normally. It would be really helpful to the end user if device states 1
and 2 were defined, not to mention reason 36. There are lots of other
device state changes and reasons in other groups of messages regarding
netowrking, all use vague numbers so you have no idea what they mean.

Here I was thinking Fedora may be a keeper. I can handle the odd bug,
but suddenly disabling eth0 is just not acceptable.