Kubuntu 8.04 network mysteriously broke

[TastyHuman]

I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 inside VMWare workstation under Windows XP for embedded firmware development. VMWare tools has been installed.

There are two network adapters on the machine, one that uses VMware NAT to allow Kubuntu to share the host network for internet and the other as a custom adapter used to attach to an embedded target that I'm developing for.

This all has worked fine for the last six months but recently it broke. I think it broke after using Adept to install a recent set of updates but can't be sure since I haven't used it for a couple of weeks.

Now when the VM is started and Kubuntu boots the networking is dead.

ifconfig -a shows two entries, lo and pan0.

Any attempt to start KNetworkManager fails with no visual error displayed, it just doesn't do anything.

Any hints on what might have broken and where to look and how to fix this would be appreciated.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Kubuntu 8.04 network mysteriously broke

I'm not familiar with either VM or KNetworkManager, but I always configure my network in the /etc/network/interfaces file. The GUI network management tools break from time to time so it's generally better just to edit the files. Good luck.

[TastyHuman]

Re: Kubuntu 8.04 network mysteriously broke

I'm not familiar with either VM or KNetworkManager, but I always configure my network in the /etc/network/interfaces file. The GUI network management tools break from time to time so it's generally better just to edit the files. Good luck.

Thanks for the tip. I used the /etc/network/interfaces file to set this up in the first place. It's pretty simple:

------------------------------------------------------
root@ken-kubuntu:/etc/network# cat interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.141.10
netmask 255.255.255.0
------------------------------------------------------

ifconfig reports that there is a pan0 device with a MAC address. What does the pan0 name represent?

[askrieger]

Re: Kubuntu 8.04 network mysteriously broke

pan = "Personal Area Networking" (affectionately called "bluetooth"). Look it up on wikipedia. If you have bluetooth devices attached to your machine, this may be your problem, i.e. your VM may not be able to handle them. If you don't use bluetooth, pan0 can be ignored.

[TastyHuman]

Re: Kubuntu 8.04 network mysteriously broke

pan = "Personal Area Networking" (affectionately called "bluetooth"). Look it up on wikipedia. If you have bluetooth devices attached to your machine, this may be your problem, i.e. your VM may not be able to handle them. If you don't use bluetooth, pan0 can be ignored.

Thanks, I guess I've heard about that and then quickly forgot about it.

This machine doesn't have bluetooth so I'm not sure why it's creating a device for it.