[lug] DHCP Question

[Zan Lynx]

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 08:18 -0600, Bill Thoen wrote:
> I take it back, Collins Richey; you were right the first time. 
> Apparently, 5 minutes is not long enough to wait before cold-booting. I 
> had the machine turned off last night and when I turned it on this 
> morning, everything worked perfectly! This machine does indeed have the 
> infamous nVidia chip set, and I don't know what "forcedeth" means, but 
> eth0 is aliased to that in modprobe.conf.  Also I was using Windows XP 
> just before I wiped it to be replaced with FC 5.
> 
> Who'd a thought that Windows could reach back from the grave and mess 
> with a system?

Network cards and chipsets often remain powered up by the motherboard.
This is for remote management.  You can send a special packet to the
network and wake up / power on the computers in order to do late-night
system updates or other tasks.

But because of this, sometimes the only way to actually reset the
network card is to pull the power plug on the computer, or flip the
physical "off" switch on the back of the power supply, if you have one.

The reason Windows was able to mess it up with Linux is probably because
the network chipset holds configuration data in some sort of persistent
memory and the Linux driver doesn't know enough to reset the bits
Windows fiddled.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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