So I’m working on a server from home.
I do a cat /sys/class/net/eth0/operstate
and it says unknown
despite the interface being obviously up, since I’m SSH’ing into the box.
I try to explicitely set the interface up to force the status to say up
with ip link set eth0 up
. No joy, still unknown
.
Hmm… maybe I should bring it down and back up.
So I do ip link set eth0 down
and… I drive 15 miles to work to do the corresponding ip link set eth0 up
50 years using Unix and I’m still doing this… 😥
If it makes you feel any better, I did something just as infuriating a few years ago.
I had set up my home media server, and had finally moved it to my garage with just a power cable and ethernet cable plugged in. Everything was working perfectly, but I needed to check something with the network settings. Being quite new to Linux, I used a remote desktop tool to log in and do everything through a gui.
I accidentally clicked the wrong item in the menu and disconnected the network. I only had a spare ps/2 keyboard and mouse, and as the server was an old computer, it would crash if I plugged a ps/2 device in while it was running*.
The remote desktop stayed open but frozen, mocking me for my obvious mistake and lack of planning, with the remote mouse icon stuck in place on the disconnect menu.
*I can’t remember if that was a ps/2 thing, or something specific to my server, but I didn’t want to risk it
Old hardware used to get really upset before plug and play became common. I remember I was playing some old racing game with a joystick on a win95 box, and accidentally pulled the connector out, lost my entire game because the system flipped out.