[PLUG] Urgent! Lost network connection after upgrade

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2013 13:51:41 -0700
Daniel Hedlund <daniel at digitree.org> dijo:

>I sat down a played on John's laptop directly for a few minutes.  When
>he upgraded to Fedora 17 it only partially upgraded his system and
>then bailed for an unknown reason, but likely due to unresolved
>conflicts or dependencies.  Most of the things that worked on his
>system were packages that did not get upgraded; he was running a F16
>version of the kernel and Xorg but everything that was going through
>systemd was referencing F17 libraries that did not get installed on
>his system.  Trying to install these RPMs resulted in even more
>dependencies and conflicts that needed upgrading.  A quick 'rpm -qa |
>grep f16' resulted in about 1k packages.
> Doing 'rpm -qa | grep f17' also resulted in around 1k packages,
> meaning about 50% upgrade.
>
>Since he was still running a F16 kernel that came bundled with his
>network drivers, his hardware was detected and a physical link was
>observable (ie via mii-tool).  However, many of the libraries that the
>network tools relied on got removed or changed to incompatible
>versions during the upgrade and no longer functioned.  Even the most
>basic ifconfig and ip commands wouldn't work because, while it could
>assign an IP address to the interface, it could not interface with the
>part of the system that managed the routing table and all DNS resolver
>related libraries were missing.

Now I know the OS is hosed and, since there is no net connection,
unrepairable. In other words, I'll have to do a fresh install. That
requires a budget of several days to get everything installed and
running again. One thing I know for sure: If I have to do a fresh
install it will not be Fedora. I'll probably buy a new computer too. 

A thousand thanks to Daniel for taking the time to figure this out!