On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 11:12:37AM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> > Needless to say this is *EXTREMELY* stupid behaviour of ifconfig
> > and completely breaks your system.
>
> Okay, for those of you who have iproute installed, you can still get things
> up and running using the ip tool. Like this:
>
> ip addr add 127.0.0.1 dev lo
> ip link set lo up
> ip route add 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo
> ip addr 10.66.2.150 dev eth0
> ip link set eth0 up
> ip route add 0.0.0.0/0 dev eth0 metric 1
>
> Change eth0 IP and default route as needed of course.
This was hilarious. I had shut down my laptop this morning after reading,
but not entirely absorbing, the above. This evening when I booted it, I
of course could not bring up eth0, which is a Proxim Symphony PCMCIA card.
Since I couldn't bring up networking, I couldn't get to this email, which
I had read by ssh'ing to my workstation. I have only the current **bad**
net-tools .deb in my /var/cache/apt/archives, of course, so there is no
hope of restoring the last good one quickly.
OK, no problem, I go to my workstation, which I had also upgraded with the
bad net-tools and had also shut down (we have a power crisis here in
California). However, I don't often apt-get autoclean my workstation, so
I quickly dpkp --install the old good net-tools and I'm back in business
there. I find and read the above email, but soon discover that I don't have
iproute on my laptop. OK, says I, I'll just install net-tools from the
Potato CD-ROMS, which leads me into rediscovering apt-cdrom and various
stuff. Guess what? net-tools didn't exist in Potato. OK, then I'll
install iproute from Potato and use the above workaround. After some
futzing that's accomplished, but when I do the first ip addr add, I
learn that:
"Cannot open netlink socket: Address family not supported by
protocol".
Needless to say, the route add doesn't work either.
OK, says I, I'll just copy the good old version 1.57 net-tools .deb
over by sneakernet. Hmmm, I've been messing with Linux since RedHat
5.1 and Debian for over a year now, and I've never used a floppy
except for boot and rescue discs. So I pull down "Learning Debian
GNU/Linux" and read up on using floppies. I'm startled to discover
that boot discs are formatted msdos, but, sure, now that I know it
that makes sense. So I mount an old RedHat boot disc, delete all
the files on it and copy over the .deb. When I cd /floppy and ls,
I see that the filename is truncated, mutter under my breath, but oh
well, I'll copy it to my laptop harddrive and rename it, so who cares?
So I carry the floppy over to the laptop, do
mount -t /dev/fd0 /floppy
and am greeted with:
mount: fs type msdos not supported by kernel
Oh f**k, I remember that when I compiled my kernel, I said to myself
"Why on earth would I want msdos support on this laptop? Not only,
NO, but Hell NO!"
OK, so I'll format the floppy ext2. The book says to
fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
but my system informs me that fdformat is obsolete and no longer
available and that I should use superformat instead. The man page
for superformat implies that I am going to get an msdos filesystem
on the floppy whether I want it or not.
So, "apropos floppy", et voila kfloppy. And sure enough kfloppy
is a nice, straightforward little program that formats floppy
discs and makes ext2 one of the options. I format the disc
and copy the net-tools .deb and check it with an ls -al and a
df and all is good. I pop it out, take it to the laptop, mount
it, cd /floppy and ls. Hmmm, the only thing there is lost and found.
WTF? OK, back to the workstation. When I put the diskette in,
it immediately starts bitching at me, and I now remember that
one must dismount a floppy before one removes it. So I format it
again with kfloppy, cp the .deb, umount /floppy, and then pop it
out. Back to the laptop, mount it, cp the .deb, dpkg --install
the good net-tools package, ifup eth0, and I'm sending this to you
from the laptop.
Well, I thought it was funny...
