Dapper networking appears to be totally hosed

[Tod Merley]

> Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 14:24:45 -0500
> From: Stephen R Laniel <steve at laniels.org>
> Subject: Dapper networking appears to be totally hosed
> To: Ubuntu users <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID: <20060131192444.GB10207 at TheloniousMonk.laniels.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Help me out here, people. I'm running Dapper, and I think
> the recent switch to udev for networking (that's what
> happened, right?) has totally hosed things.
>
> First, my NICs are constantly changing back and forth:
> sometimes the wireless is eth1 and sometimes it's eth0. I
> suppose this depends on the order in which they come up, but
> it shouldn't, right: I thought that's what iftab(5) and
> ifrename(8) were all about; since my NICs' MAC addresses
> are listed in /etc/iftab, I thought my NICs' names would
> always be the same. The only times they seem to change are
> when Ubuntu is going through big changes, as it was during
> Breezy development and as it is now for Dapper.
>
> More importantly by far, I keep losing network connectivity
> -- either I'm getting knocked totally offline, or I'm
> getting such slow performance that it just *looks* like
> nothing is happening; I can't tell. If I then do an
> ifdown/ifup, I get back online for a short time. Then the
> connection dies again. I've not followed it up, but I think
> it may be the case that doing
>
> 1) ifdown
> 2) ifup
> 3) start downloading a very large file
>
> will keep me online for longer: it's as though the large
> file's download is holding something open that would
> otherwise have closed.
>
> So what's going on? Why does networking appear to be totally
> screwed?
>
> --
> Stephen R. Laniel
> steve at laniels.org
> Cell: +(617) 308-5571
> http://laniels.org/


Ok, a place to start:

Go to System>Administration>Networking

It will ask for a password, use your user password.

The "Network Settings" box will pop up with the "Connections" tab active.
Here you should be able to see which of your connections came up (it will
tell you that the interface is active).  It will also tell you which of the
devices is the "Default gateway device" (which device the system will route
packets to that are addressed for outside the network - e.g. the public
internet).

My guess is that your wireless device is your path to the internet.  If so,
click on the device you believe to be the wireless device (mine is wlan0)
and then hit the properties button. An "Interface Properties" box should pop
up. The ESSID is the identifying name of an
802.11x<http://wiki.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/802_2e11b>wireless
network. By specifying the ESSID (Extended Service Set
Identification) in your client setup is how you make sure that you connect
to your wireless network instead of your neighbors network by mistake.
You also have some settings which tell how the interface is identified with
an IP setup.  Usually this is by DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol).  The
DHCP is controlled from the wireless access point and is basically
automatic.  My first guess is that the wireless card setup is somehow
differant and that perhaps you connected to a network further away and
sometimes out of range.

Well enough for a start.  For further study
(from Applications>Assories>Terminal):

man ifconfig
man iwconfig
man route

And from the internet: http://www.aboutdebian.com/network.htm
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CategoryNetworking?highlight=%28CategoryNetworking%29

Good Hunting!

Tod
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