Ethernet randomly stops working after upgrading from 22.04

[jasoncollege24]

network is a 1 gigabit connection. Worked fine in 22.04. Every so often (usually once or twice a day) the network stops sending/receiving data. If I click "Disconnect" on the connection, it vanishes for a few seconds then appears again. clicking "Connect" at this point restores the network.

CPU is a i7-4790 on a Z97-DH3 motherboard. For other reasons, I've recently replaced my router, and several cables including this one. I've tried restarts, power resets, and apt updates to no avail. I have another system running the 24.04 (clean install) which doesn't have any ethernet issues. That system dual-boots with Windows, which also has no ethernet issues.

This machine is remotely administrated, and somewhat tedious to get to physically. it runs a cloud service, and a smart home service. I'd like to try to keep this system online as much as possible, without having to physically get to it. If anyone can help, I'd greatly appreciate it. Need more information? Let me know.

[jlittle]

I have a Gigabyte motherboard of a similar vintage. It has an Intel ethernet chip that uses the e1000e driver, and unpredictably starts exhibiting the behaviour you describe.

Unfortunately, on my hardware there is a bug in the hardware, so a driver update can't fix it. But, if I tickle the connection, the problem occurs much less. I run a script that pings my router every 4 seconds, and writes to a log file. If I suspect a connection problem, I look at the end of the log file to see if the regular 4 s ping appears.

[jasoncollege24]

Thanks for the reply.

With a little help from ChatGPT, I discovered that I'm using the same e1000e driver. I told it to search the web for a potential solution, and it suggested that I disable offloading to the NIC by adding the service file shown in the code block.

Unfortunately this didn't resolve it. I'm not good at troubleshooting network issues in Linux, because I rarely have them. Usually, the network just works. I could probably do something similar to what you're doing... Have a script ping the router every 15 seconds, and restart the NetworkManager service if a ping fails.

[Unit]
Description=Disable EEE on Intel e1000e NIC
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ethtool --set-eee eno1 eee off

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target