This is a real emergency! The network card inside my desktop computer seems to have disappeared. That's
the only way I can describe it. I have three systems on that machine: in Crux and LFS, the driver is built
in and the card always comes up automatically. In Debian, the kernel detects the card and loads the correct
module. Today none of these systems detects the card and Debian does not load the driver. If I modprobe the
driver, it loads but nothing else happens. In none of my systems does /sys/class/net contain
anything but the loopback interface. Last night, when I shut down Crux, everything was normal.

I am typing this on my laptop, Littleboy. I also have Oldboy upstairs, an old 32-bit machine that runs
AntiX, so I am not completely cut off. But I'm seriously crippled. Has anybody any idea of how I could
proceed? How do I diagnose this?

Things break - hardly unknown. Chuck another one in it. I've given up on cable, so I just have USB wifi dongles in a couple of my machines - I have 2 with broken network cards.

That's rather remiss of you......

Old kit needs the electrical contacts cleaned every now & again, open up the box & remove & insert the card a couple of times, that should be enough to clean the terminals, (also the connecting cable terminals). If that doesn't work, try it in another slot - if it's dead, grab another card to put in there, or, if you want, use a USB stick or base unit for your connection. (Sticks cost upwards of £5)

P.S. Also try a different cable if it's cat5.

While washing, I suddenly thought"lspci". I ran downstairs and tried it. No ethernet card. So it's definitely lost contact either with the motherboard or with its power supply.
The trouble is I am a klutz. I can't touch anything without breaking it. The last time I opened that machine, it was with a friend who doesn't know anything about computers but is good with his hands. We were trying to change the failing battery. And we couldn't even get the old one out; it was welded to the mobo. That's how old the machine is! Maybe someone at the Harrow Computer club could help me reseat the card. In the mean time I need a sticking plaster.

I do have a wifi dongle, which is plugged into Oldboy upstairs. I could try that. It probably wouldn't work in LFS but it should in Debian. I've just checked and I do have wpa_supplicant there. That dongle hates being moved and misbehaves if it isn't exactly seated, but it's worth trying.

An alternative possibility is to install a proper system on this laptop. I'v got LFS on it at the moment but it's not really suitable for local building. And I don't have Firefox on it, only Links, which means I can't use Google Mail. However I have found a CD with a Debian Stretch netinstall. If I plugged the laptop into the router and installed Debian with a simple desktop (probably fluxbox) plus FF and claws, I'd at least be able to get my email back.

Postscript: Debian recognises the dongle. I now have a wlan interface with a weird name. Now to try and get it recognised by my router. Logging off here.

Grr! It needs firmware which my Debian doesn't have. And of course I can't install it using apt without a working network card!

However I found the firmware package using links on littleboy. I put it on a stick and I will havce to install it using dpkg. Not exactly the preferred way of doing things. The package came from Jessie, not Stretch, but I imagine for firmware it doesn't make much difference.

I also tried logging in to google to see if I could at least read my email. But they wanted confirmatory information which I couldn't remember. It's years since I set up that account. In any case istr that gmail doesn't work with links.

I hope you get it diagnosed and get a solution.

Hard to advise here. Well not really, given the frustration you're citing and the stories you've told about your history with hardware, I'd advise you to not tinker.

You are VERY savvy with Linux, I can fully get that you admit to things being risky if you tinker inside the computer. The only recommendation I could make is that if you choose to proceed, then do so at a paced and meticulous rate, versus rush to get it done. Either that, or do not proceed.

By the way, your comment about the battery? Yes the system is old, but the state of the battery doesn't indicate exactly that. Many batteries are soldered down. Their holders are cheap wire or sheet metal, where the lead of that wire or metal is soldered to the board, and the battery is soldered both to the board as well as to that metal wire/sheet. Why? Because is it very inexpensive as opposed to purchasing and installing an actual battery holder. The law of probabilities is that the backup battery is designed to last 10+ years and some may last longer. Meanwhile some may last far briefer. Either case, that's the design and fabrication decision the MB vendor chose to make. A very common one when you get to mass production. As sad as it is, I've sat in endless meetings where they discuss shaving off 1/2 a cent of cost for something.

It came up again! Weird, isn't it: I shut the computer down for a few hours and when I started it up again, there was the ethernet card with its usual name!

I still want to install that dongle firmware though, just in case. Now I can do it via apt-get if I temporarily add non-free to my Debian repos.

A lot of folks in this thread have talked casually about buying a few extra network cards or dongles. I have no obvious place to buy them from, now that Maplins has gone bust. That was a wonderful store. I used to go in sometimes just to browse.

Should I mark this solved? It's not really a solution as I don't know what happened or what changed during the day. But the dongle will be a solution of sorts if I can get it to work.

The long-term solution is probably to start treating my laptop as a proper computer, not a toy, and get a mainstream distro onto it in place of LFS.

Put AntiX on your laptop......you know it makes sense

P.S. Ask around at your computer club, someone will have some spare network cards, & possibly an old wifi card to spare - & if you're lucky, some kind soul will fit it & set it up for you.

Edit: Failing that, you might get lucky on 'Freecycle'.

Hey, that's brilliant! I was thinking of Debian with a lightweight desktop but AntiX would be better. And I have an up-to-date 64-bit image, as I recently made a disc for a friend.
I was a freecycler for a while, but I got tired of the endless emails. You can ask for a digest instead, but then anything interesting is gone by the time you notice it.

The Harrow Computer Club is a possibility. In the mean time I have paid the insurance by installing the Ralink firmware needed by the dongle and also printing out the pages from the manual that deal with inserting and removing expansion cards.

AntiX has worked flawlessly for me for years now, on lots of different machines.

(I used to be a Debian devotee too, way back, but swapped to #!, & when he stopped creating it, I transferred over to AntiX - & I don't like systemd, too much like MS registry).

The apple ethernet dongle works good in linux. The asix kernel module, no firmware needed. I got it OTS at a radio shack long ago (the only "apple" device I own). The only one they had at radio shack and they never restocked it, even back then. So I got a couple linksys ones from walmart as well. They require firmware, but do gigabit. One of the two I have is flakey, so I have to unplug, replug every once in a while.

Ethernet being wired can get zapped from things like lightning strikes. Or other "thanks power company" quirks. I have an old asus rt-n12 with a fried port from lightning. But 4 of the 5 ports still work.

But it isn't fried! It works perfectly at the moment. That means it had to be an intermittent fault, probably a bad contact.

Done! I did a standard install (no faffing around with manual partitioning) and easily got the wifi to work using ceni. Then I did the big first update you always have to do after a fresh install. There's still no email client and no libreoffice, but plenty of time to install those. I was impressed that AntiX immediately found the correct driver for my video card (openchrome). Yes, it's a lovely distro!

The network card on Bigboy has gone awol twice more but most days it reports for duty.

Can try a different slot if it is an add on card?

I see this from time to time on other hardware. Sometimes the motherboard BIOS will simply lose something on the PCI bus, which is what appears to have happened here. Rebooting doesn't fix the problem because it isn't a problem at the OS level, but at a more fundamental level. Even a power cycle sometimes won't help.

If this happens to you again, my recommendation as a possible remedy is to full unplug the system for at least thirty seconds, then start up normally. Chances are it will come right up without issues. That is, if it even ever happens again.