My roommate’s cat is a wuss. If you walk in his general vicinity he cowers. The other morning I woke up and walked into the living room and he was behind the couch. I walked past him and he didn’t move. I shook my foot at him and he still didn’t move. So I pushed him out from behind the couch and he ran a couple of feet. And with him he took the plastic grocery bag that he had around his neck.

Just so everyone understands… It’s just resting around his neck. The hole that makes the handle on this plastic bag is big enough for the cat to walk through. He’s really just that dense.

The bag was kind of torn and it was dragging behind him. He would run about two feet and stop, thinking the bag was chasing him. So I stomped at him to make him move away and then he would get all scared and stop.

Cruel right? No, hysterical.

He got to the point where he just wouldn’t move because the bag never stopped following him.

I left him like that when I went to work. Heh. Dumb cat.

I would have paid to be in the conference room when this marketing genius stood up and said, “Wait… I’ve got it! YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASPERCREME!”

I mean… Who then responds, “Holy crap, that’s great!”

I would have responded, “Holy crap, you’re fired!”

Seriously.

The onboard NIC is currently enabled.

Still having the same problems as yesterday.

First random attempt was to add pci=routeirq to the end of the kernel line. This did nothing.

I booted into the oldest kernel (there were three on the list including the newest one), and ran:

lspci | grep -i ethernet

which returned:

0000:04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.: Unknown Device 4361 (rev 17)
0000:06:00.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller


The Marvell card is the onboard NIC. I checked the network interfaces file:

vim /etc/network/interfaces

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

#The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp


I ran dhclient in the older kernel and ifconfig returned a valid IP address on eth1.

I booted into the new kernel, and it still hung at the network configuration. So I rebooted into the older kernel. I had no network connection. So I ran dhclient and again, it obtained an IP address.

Then… Clarity.

eth1 is not listed in /etc/network/interfaces. I opened the file and changed every instance of eth0 to eth1.

I booted into the newest Hoary kernel.

And my network connection worked.

DONE AND DONE.

I tried to install electric sheep last week. And it wasn’t working, so I assumed that I was doing something wrong, since I remembered it being really simple, and nothing I was doing worked. So a few minutes ago, I asked Ken what you do to install electric sheep. And he told me. And I was doing it right. (I even just used the up arrow in terminal to go to the command I used last week.) So he looks at it, and I look at it, and he pokes around a little bit… And he says to me “Well evidently Warty doesn’t have it.” “But that’s Hoary.” “No it isn’t, this says Warty.”

…

“I upgraded it.” “What?”

So now I’m thinking I did that wrong too, but he says again what you’re supposed to type, and I did exactly that last time. I used the up arrow again, and the commands were all still there. Ken suggested that perhaps I didn’t save. I thought about it for a minute… I asked him how you save in gedit, and he said he wasn’t sure. So i opened it.

I had forgotten that it’s an actual text editor. There’s a save button. And if you try to close out of it without saving, it protests.

Somehow this box reverted itself to Warty.

So…………

Ken ran the upgrade again. I watched it happen. Looked exactly like it did last week. Ken pointed out that it can’t just revert; it downloads over a thousand packages, they can’t just disappear. But I watched them download myself.

Then, I rebooted. And it hung. Again.

I tried booting into recovery mode and when it got to the network configuration, it gave the error:


eth0: — ERROR –
Class: Hardware failure
Nr: 0xd9
Msg: FATAL: SKGeStopPort() does not terminate (Tx)
eth0: Port A failed.


I started trying anything and everything. I disabled the onboard NIC in the bios. Then I was at least able to skip network configuration during boot with ctrl+c. But there was no network connection. I rebooted into an older kernel. Still nothing.

We tried different PCI express settings in the bios to see if that might have been part of the problem. Then, we started changing random settings just to see what would happen. We have no idea what some of them are. Nothing worked.

This has taken all day. Time to go home.