Update 158 --> to 161 problems with USB Ethernet Adpater

[pmueller (Peter Müller)]

Hi,

thank you for the detailed post.

@rejjysail

1-) Either something overwrote or reconfigured the internal firmware of both ‘USB to Ethernet’ devices for GREEN and BLUE (different manufacturers) during the ipFire upgrade

Some very cheap NICs, especially USB-to-LAN-adapters, do not seem to have a MAC address configured in their firmware. The packets you observed look like a faulty firmware indeed, emitting network packets without a source MAC.

Apparently, the Linux kernel we shipped in Core Update 163 contained a bug, so some of those NICs in conjunction with certain USB hubs were not initialised correctly (many other distributions reported this as well).

It is still interesting to see that you managed to get around this issue; I was unable to do so for the affected IPFire installation. Oh well…

@rejjysail

2-) or something within the Dell’s Intel-i7 motherboard remembered the device ID of the 2 USB devices which may have gotten corrupted during the hard power off after the pakfire issue, and set them to work a certain way (spanning tree).

Hm, I don’t think so, at least I doubt this would be the root cause of it.

@rejjysail

However, mystery question remains as to why pakfire was already running when I clicked on the 161 → 163 upgrade notice at the bottom of the home screen, which created a conflict and error situation.

That is an unrelated bug, being fixed in Core Update 164, where the Pakfire CGI has been massively improved.

By the way: Did upgrading to Core Update 164 (testing) changed or improved something in your setup?

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller