On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 12:37:12 -0800 David Christensen <dpchr...@holgerdanske.com> wrote:
> debian-user: > > I am continuing to work on the idea of installing Debian on a USB > flash drive for use in many machines, primarily for diagnostics, > maintenance, repair, backup, archive, imaging, etc.. > > <snip details of Ethernet problem with one machine and USB stick> > > > (Then again, I don't even know if I'm barking up the right tree.) > > You may well not be. > > Any ideas? > Another view: I've had a USB hard drive set up to do this for some years, but the strain of living in my jacket pocket may be telling, it's getting a bit unreliable. But it boots on everything I've ever tried except one machine (OK, two, but I wouldn't bother trying i386 software on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi). There's one suggestion: if you install i386/486/whatever it should also run on 32-bit hardware. I have a 32-bit netbook, and you may one day want to deal with an older machine. It's quite useful to have a pocket-sized PC containing all the software you want, just needing the addition of pretty well any loaned PC wherever you happen to be. It beats carrying a laptop... it also means that if I do have my Windows 8 laptop I can [fairly] safely use it on public wifi. On the desk in front of me at this very moment is a USB stick with an i386 sid installation. It's still text-based, I haven't yet added any graphical software, I'm waiting for the combination of time and enthusiasm to troubleshoot an odd networking problem. It boots up fine on my netbook and laptop, but on my main desktop, it has no Ethernet connection after booting... Why you may be barking up the wrong tree is that all the software is there, but the Ethernet interface is not being brought up. DHCP on my network is not being used, though the DHCP client is installed. If I bring up the interface manually with a suitable IP address, all is well. Try that exercise in your situation, my assumption would be that if you can bring it up manually then you have the right drivers installed. By manually I mean using ifconfig or other networking software, without the need to bring in any extra modules with modprobe. So no, I don't have the answer yet, but it may be the same problem. The USB hard drive was installed using the same desktop machine, the USB stick was installed with my laptop, both i386 installations made while running on amd64 hardware. I don't know yet if this is significant, but certainly if I had installed to the USB stick while plugged into the desktop, I would expect networking to behave properly on that machine. Of course, it might not then work on the laptop... I haven't got around to finishing the job as I'm considering buying a small SSD for this job, which would give me more speed and space than a USB stick while being mechanically more reliable than my current pocket hard drive. -- Joe
