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Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:24 pm
by T J Tulley
Recently Celena refused to boot, repeatedly showing a screen reporting "apt-get is not installed - you can install it by typing apt-get install apt" - which doesn't sound very sensible.
So this morning I re-installed Celena on sda with partitions for root, home and swap. I didn't touch sdc which carries Daryna, now my main system. Since then I have run both systems, but I am not sure whether I have had a working internet connection via Daryna since Celena was re-installed. That process re-configured grub, but should not otherwise have interfered with the Daryna installation.
Daryna has suddenly stopped connecting to the internet. In Thunderbird it reports failure to find mail servers, and similarly in Firefox for any requested address. A rotating icon sits in the system tray, and mouseover that shows a message: "Requesting a network address from the wired network".
I am sending this from Celena in the same PC with the same physical connection - so what can I do to restore the Daryna network configuration? It has always worked "out of the box" and indeed has worked earlier today, possibly before the Celena re-installation.
Please help!
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 4:13 pm
by Fred
T J Tulley,
I know you went to Labels on your ntfs partitions. Don't know if you are still using UUIDs on your other partitions or not. If you are, the UUIDs of the partitions you tampered with by installing another system have changed. You will need to correct the UUIDs in your /etc/fstab file. This may very well fix your problem. Incorrect UUIDs can cause some really strange problems.
See the wiki and/or search the forum for how to do this.
Fred
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 6:19 pm
by T J Tulley
Thanks Fred - but Daryna is unchanged and that is where I have no connection. The labels are working perfectly, and all the partitions are correctly presented on the desktop; links to them are working. I think I'm fairly familiar with fstab and labels now - in Daryna there was a reference in the boot sequence and in fstab to sda7, a partition which was removed by re-formatting to re-install Celena, and I have removed that from fstab in Daryna. NB - Daryna is on sdc which was untouched.
In Celena, there is some work to do on mounting - the screen is full of broken links. During the re-install I selected Mint Disk instead of fstab - I have to learn about using Mint Disk. Nevertheless in Celena I have in fact got a connection which I am using now. [So my signature below is not correct for this!]
BTW, the same partitions are being used for / and /home, and /home is slightly enlarged. Both of their UUIDs are changed, but of course the installation looked after that.
How do I re-configure the connection in Daryna? Obviously it is not a hardware problem as the same hardware is working for Celena.
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:34 pm
by T J Tulley
Hopefully before a further reply, I can add a bit more info.
Daryna still refuses to connect - as I reported originally, A rotating icon sits in the system tray, and mouseover that shows a message: "Requesting a network address from the wired network".
R-click on this produces a small menu - including Properties and About.
"Properties" gives a table headed Active Connection Information
Interface Wired Ethernet ( eth0)
Speed 100 Mb/s
Driver 8139too
followed by:
IP Address, Broadcast Address, Subnet Mask, Default Router, Primary DNS, Secondary DNS - all tabulated showing 0.0.0.0 for each one, then Hardware Address 00:40:E4:84:42:CE
"About" says: nm-applet 0.65
Notification area applet for managing network devices
http:
www.gnome.org/projects.NetworkManager
After a bit of fiddling the Celena installation is back to normal.
The re-installation astonished me by retaining my Thunderbird profile and mailboxes - I expected to have to restore them from a backup.
My urgent need is for advice about restoring internet functionality to Daryna - for which I shall be most grateful.
I fear I may have to re-install. One possibility would be a second installation of Daryna in new partitions - I have plenty of room on that 500 GB disk, though it's getting further from the edge (noting Fred's recent advice in the Newbies forum). This will be a temporary stage - ultimately I am looking forward to using Elyssa, hopefully for a long time.
I'm still hoping for advice about Thunderbird (another topic, in Software & Applications forum, posted April 30 - no replies yet.
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 4:37 am
by miket
Hi,
Can you please do the following and post the results back here ?
Boot into Daryna, login as normal.
Open a Terminal and in it type the following:
Code: Select all
sudo ifconfig -a
sudo dhclient eth0
Hopefully this will tell us why you are not getting an IP Address from your DHCP server.
Mike.
T J Tulley wrote:Hopefully before a further reply, I can add a bit more info.
Daryna still refuses to connect - as I reported originally, A rotating icon sits in the system tray, and mouseover that shows a message: "Requesting a network address from the wired network".
R-click on this produces a small menu - including Properties and About.
"Properties" gives a table headed Active Connection Information
Interface Wired Ethernet ( eth0)
Speed 100 Mb/s
Driver 8139too
followed by:
IP Address, Broadcast Address, Subnet Mask, Default Router, Primary DNS, Secondary DNS - all tabulated showing 0.0.0.0 for each one, then Hardware Address 00:40:E4:84:42:CE
"About" says: nm-applet 0.65
Notification area applet for managing network devices
http:
www.gnome.org/projects.NetworkManager
After a bit of fiddling the Celena installation is back to normal.
The re-installation astonished me by retaining my Thunderbird profile and mailboxes - I expected to have to restore them from a backup.
My urgent need is for advice about restoring internet functionality to Daryna - for which I shall be most grateful.
I fear I may have to re-install. One possibility would be a second installation of Daryna in new partitions - I have plenty of room on that 500 GB disk, though it's getting further from the edge (noting Fred's recent advice in the Newbies forum). This will be a temporary stage - ultimately I am looking forward to using Elyssa, hopefully for a long time.
I'm still hoping for advice about Thunderbird (another topic, in Software & Applications forum, posted April 30 - no replies yet.
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 7:06 am
by T J Tulley
Thanks Mike: I did as you advised -here is the record of the terminal (copied & pasted into Gedit, then saved into my data store for access from Celena!):
From Daryna terminal, 3/5/08; 11:49
theo@TJT5Daryna:~$ sudo ifconfig -a
sudo: must be setuid root
theo@TJT5Daryna:~$ cd /
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$ sudo ifconfig -a
sudo: must be setuid root
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$ dhclient eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.5
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit
http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/
Can't create /var/run/dhclient.pid: Permission denied
drop_privileges: could not set group id: Operation not permitted
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$
As you see, the first command was rejected - that has happened recently with sudo commands in Daryna; if I enter setuid it responds saying setuid isn't installed, and tells me to use apt-get et c. -
Now I see that I failed to enter sudo with the second command. Hope the above is some use - now I'm in a bit of a rush; I think I shall do an additional installation of Daryna - boot always hangs, goes into a text screen saying correct filesystem manually - all rather deep water for me! I have to type [Ctl]+[D] to continue boot.
Re: Sudden loss of connection! Urgent please.
Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 5:35 am
by miket
Hi !
Ok, this looks like your filesystem user/privileges are messed up in a big way OR that your /etc/passwd & /etc/group file are messed up ??
To try and unpick this via a forum is going to be near impossible, if I had the machine in front of me or remote access then I could do it,
but it could take some time.
If you don't have any important data on the partition(s) used by Daryna I would suggest re-installing it to the same partition(s).
Make sure you point it at the correct partitions during the installation!
Mike.
T J Tulley wrote:Thanks Mike: I did as you advised -here is the record of the terminal (copied & pasted into Gedit, then saved into my data store for access from Celena!):
From Daryna terminal, 3/5/08; 11:49
theo@TJT5Daryna:~$ sudo ifconfig -a
sudo: must be setuid root
theo@TJT5Daryna:~$ cd /
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$ sudo ifconfig -a
sudo: must be setuid root
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$ dhclient eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.5
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit
http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/
Can't create /var/run/dhclient.pid: Permission denied
drop_privileges: could not set group id: Operation not permitted
theo@TJT5Daryna:/$
As you see, the first command was rejected - that has happened recently with sudo commands in Daryna; if I enter setuid it responds saying setuid isn't installed, and tells me to use apt-get et c. -
Now I see that I failed to enter sudo with the second command. Hope the above is some use - now I'm in a bit of a rush; I think I shall do an additional installation of Daryna - boot always hangs, goes into a text screen saying correct filesystem manually - all rather deep water for me! I have to type [Ctl]+[D] to continue boot.