Re: Network Interface Conundrum

On 22 September 2012 18:14, Rich Shepard <[email protected]> wrote:
>   I've been trying to solve this problem since I bought the Sony Vaio at the
> end of last November (10 months ago). It's running 13.37/x86_64 with the
> 3.2.7 kernel (needed to solve the brand-new video issue) and has all the
> updates installed.
>
>   The problem is that the laptop cannot connect to a wireless network. It
> can communicate with the access point, but not send packets to the server
> behind that. I tracked the issue to the presence of eth0 even when there is
> no ethernet cable connected. Looking at the contents of
> /sys/class/net/eth0/carrier shows '0', no ethernet connected. wicd-client
> can bring up wlan0, but packets seem to prefer to go out the non-functional
> eth0 interface instead.
>
>   ifplugd is invoked during boot (/etc/rc.d/init.d/ifplugd), but it does not
> take down eth0 when there's no cable attached. As root I can run 'ifconfig
> eth0 down' and eth0 goes away so wlan0 works, but that is not a solution for
> the user of the portable.
>
>   There must be something fairly simple that I'm not finding in my Web
> searches. The system recognizes no ethernet cable, but the interface is
> still UP but not RUNNING.
>
>   This is the only portable of 6 running linux over the years that has this
> issue. The solution is beyond my experience and knowledge; your help is
> solicitied and will be well received.
>

What's the output of "ifconfig -a" ?