Fed11: GNOME Network Configuration and Network Device Control screwed-up.

[bandersnoot]

Hi all, I'm not quite a newbie. > 10 years ago I was a UNIX administrator, but my foo is very weak and I am dependent on the GNOME gui tools.

I was happily putting the finishing touches on the subject Fedora 11 server, when I screwed something up and for a while its network connection was down. Now it has come back but I don't know why.

The system-config-network 1.5.97 tool is behaving strangely. When I open the Network Device Control view, there are no network interfaces listed. When I open the Network Configuration view, the eth0 device is listed, but I can't activate it, the Activate-Deactivate buttons are grayed out.

Right now, eth0 shows as active, but it activated itself on it's own, I have no control through the GUI. I have it configured with a static IP and I am unable to switch to DHCP.

Vncserver, samba and vsftpd are accessible.

At this point I don't know how to troubleshoot this.

The only other clue I have is that there was a network-related service at the top of the list in system-config-services 0.99.33, but now it's gone. I don't know what it was, I just remember that it had something to do with the network.

Just before the problem started I was messing with packages, I removed a lot of non-Western font packages (Urdu, etc.) and I removed Dial-Up Networking. I don't know how to "refresh" a package, and I don't want to screw it up more by blindly installing stuff.

Thanks for any and all help. This is an important project and I can't proceed until I have some confidence that things are running as they should..

- Tim

[bandersnoot]

After some looking around, I investigated NetworkManager, found it was not installed. Seems it is dependent on some part of PPP, which may have been blown away when I removed Dial-Up Networking. So I used yum to reinstall NetworkManager.

Happily, it looks like NetworkManager was the service that I thought was missing, as it appears in the same place. It's enabled and running. Rebooted and network seems to come back up okay, vncserver, samba and ftp are running.

However, system-config-network still doesn't work.

EDITED TO ADD: eth0 went down again for no apparent reason. I have been restarting NetworkManager and network using service and it still makes no sense.

The biggest thing that concerns me is why does system-config-network not see the profies? I have looked around the /etc/sysconfig/networking on another F11 machine and I see no difference between them.

I hate this. UNIX was easier in the old days.