Sod's law

[jlittle]

My ancient main desktop^* died last year, I've been limping along with an old box I'd used to check out Lubuntu. With Kubuntu it was slow and unreliable, often needing big sticks (kwin_x11 --replace, pkill plasma...) and workarounds just to get logged in.

Just got my shiny new i7 - SSD - 16 GiB RAM, started to install 16.04 - no ethernet. "net unreachable". Connection was active, but no internet. Checked cables, swapped cables. Tried a 15.04 USB I've used before. zip. Poured over configurations in the UEFI... rebooted with cables in, out and upside down. Maybe the gigabit port needs a different cable...

Aargh... Admitting defeat, I shift around keyboards and mice and boot the old box to start googling the problem... no ethernet. ADSL router diagnostics page, ADSL down. The first time in about 5 years, just when I'm plugging in a new system. The cable to the new box hid the ADSL up light, so I didn't notice it wasn't on.

16.04 looks good, yay the invert desktop effect is back.

^*I replaced everything in that box, except the Athlon CPU and the DVD drive. Motherboard, RAM, discs, the power supply twice, so it's debatable how old it was.

[Qqmike]

Ha! Nice little story. The Internet connection dilemma happened to me awhile back. I'm forgetting the details, but I decided to conduct some experiment, only to find no Ethernet connection working for Internet. Tried and tried, messed and messed. Turns out that for this brief 15-minute period, my very reliable CenturyLink Internet was down for some reason (maintenance problems?)! I chose the wrong window of time to do that experiment, drove me nuts trying to troubleshoot my Internet.

Sounds like you got your upgraded box up and running -- Nice.

[SecretCode]

Been there!

[Spadge]

Sounds like my old granddad's hammer; it's had 4 new handles and 3 new heads.

[Silent Observer]

Heh. I've got a box like that, too -- the case is (IIRC) thirteen years old, but the power supply, motherboard/RAM/CPU, both hard disks that were in it originally, and most if not all of the expansion cards have been replaced over the years. The CD drive is still original, as are the floppy drives -- which, however, one 5.25" and one 3.5", aren't connected to anything because there's no floppy controller/connector on the "new" motherboard I installed seven and a half years ago. The newest components are the CPU, upgraded from Core2Duo to Core2Quad three years ago, and the SSD, installed new with tax refund money about two years ago. With 4 cores at 2.7 GHz, I don't feel like I'm giving much away to even the newest machines, but I wish I had a bigger RAM limit -- 4 GB isn't as much as it used to be.