Things were going very well, updates working fine over the past couple of weeks.

But today my heart sunk; after the update using Synaptic the network connection was lost and not recoverable.
"network-admin" in root terminal brings up some gobbledygoop about gtk lost, etc.

The system seems otherwise ok, but my wireless network and all other networks in the networking tool
are greyed out.

Network Manager itself will not start.

We were using 4 computers now with antiX on them, all three laptops were borked with this update. The pc
is ok it appears.

This is very serious because we need our laptops at this facility for work. Now we have to put the Windows
hard drives back in all of them. __{{emoticon}}__

That is a real pain.

When you say Network Manager, which app do you mean?

What got upgraded recently that caused the network to breaK/ Any ideas?

Have a look in /var/apt/term.log (as root) to see what got recently upgraded.

Frisco:
I'm sorry to hear about this problem. What repos are you using? Stable, testing or sid?

I had a laptop that I used as my main work laptop and had only the stable repos open. That system was rock solid. Then I got bored and started playing around with sid and updating kernels and I'm having a lot of wireless issues also (thankfully not with the MEPIS kernel yet). Makes me wish I had kept it as stable, and use my other computers to fool around with unstable debian sources.

I hope you can resolve this problem.

Pedro

Well I admit that we did not look at the repos. We left it all the defaults, whatever they are. Probably"testing" ones.

That distro is LOVED by the people here who've been using it; we went through a lot to arrive at antiX after many others.

Now we need to either figure this out quick before the next quarter starts (small private school here) or just leave Windows
in so production will not miss a beat.

I'll put the antiX hard drive back in this Toshiba later today and explore the /var files etc.

"network-admin" in root terminal brings up Network Manager, but all the controls/buttons on it are greyed out except
for"close" which closes the application.

Frisco,

typing network-admin as root in a terminal on antiX-M8 does nothing. There is no network-admin app installed by default in antiX.

Repos will be stable/testing by default.

anticapitalista wrote:Frisco,

typing network-admin as root in a terminal on antiX-M8 does nothing. There is no network-admin app installed by default in antiX.

Repos will be stable/testing by default.

But that's what the"help" button on the Network Manager app said to do. Don't forget, we're running Gnome on all 4 machines
with antiX.

There are no other networking applications that have a"connect" button. We're baffled, the os has changed after that update.

It was just connecting with our network about 20 seconds after booting up, automagically.

Ok, so you are using gnome-network-admin.

Try this.

apt-get install --reinstall gnome-network-admin/stable

No network access negates any apt-get attempts. __{{emoticon}}__

We did try using Synaptic and it went through a routine as if it were reinstalling, but the same borked utility was
there when it was done; greyed out values.

This is on all three notebook computers, the same thing. Something is wrong with the updates. All are
on Gnome and all have been working flawlessly until that long (233 packages) update today; we had not
had the machines on for about 8 days due to vacation.

We thought we had all this resolved. We've been through many many distros in an effort to rid this
department of Windows.

My boss has insisted we"stop messing around with linux and get the Windows back online" etc. I have
from now until Sunday evening to fix it or just go back to Windows. Linux was what we wanted and
have been working on, but it does seem that updates ruin the os after a while at some point in time
no matter the distro. Every time we ran updates in antiX though we were happy, and getting confident.

Until today. __{{emoticon}}__

Is it possible to do some sort of"repair install" or whatever from the disc we burned?

If you can somehow get the gnome-network-admin .deb from stable repos (here is a link to it)

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/gnome-network-admin/download"
linktext was:"http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/g ... n/download"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false
and then as root
dpkg -i nameofdebfile.deb
then I think it will work. (You can use the livecd go to the link and download the deb., place it in your /home folder of the installed system and then do the above)
I tested on a box of mine, installing gnome and the gnome-network-admin that gets installed from testing repo grays out, but the one from stable doesn't.

The other alternative is a re-install, but comment out the testing repo before installing gnome.

One last thing. Have a look in /var/cache/apt/archives for the gnome-network-admin.deb that is from stable ie version 2.22.0-3, if it is there, the again in that directory

dpkg -i gnome-network-admin_2.22.0-3_i386.deb

Good luck.

Edit: antiX also comes with the mepis network tool (mnetwork) and ceni that may get things back on line again - oh and also also wicd for antiX full version.

Using the live CD is a great idea!

Will we have access to our files with the live CD? I mean all the stuff we have put together on the hard
drives in our work, etc?

Btw, none of the Mepis stuff in that menu is working; it all got borked after that update. Even if
we get this fixed, the big questions are: 1. why did it happen? and 2. will it happen again. I mean
on several different machines? That's amazing and proves the update it self had something seriously
wrong in it. That's scarey. __{{emoticon}}__

The livecd should see all the files users put in their /home folders and can be saved to a cd/usb etc (make sure permissions are saved)

Unless you have cleaned out the cache, you might find all the deb files you have downloaded in /var/cache/apt/archives. You may want to keep them.

I am fairly certain that the fault lies with gnome-network-admin getting upgraded in Testing and borking the whole setup. The version in stable should fix it.

This is a perfect example of why it's a good idea to stick with"Stable" repos for anything that's mission critical. Just done an update here (Without Gnome) on a fresh install of Antix 8, and all works fine.

I hope that you manage to get it sorted out in time.

DJiNN

I've learned a lot.

Like is being said here, I must take the trouble to have the stable repos to draw from rather than testing, I must
look and configure those things because these machines are"mission critical."

We decided to go in and CD all files we need and reinstall antiX. All has gone well.

Like I said, I've learned a lot.

Great distros still need responsible people deploying them and taking care of them. __{{emoticon}}__

Thank you so much for your help, interest and humane way of going about it with me. Much much appreciated.

My two cents:

Being that these are mission critical machines I would stick to stable repos alone. The debian stable repos are rock solid and dependable. Another thing to think about is maybe a spare machine running as a file/backup server. You could test updates on this machine to look for issues before you set them loose in the office. Keep you files on a different partition/drive so if you bork it again your stuff is safe.

/$0.02

eriefisher wrote:My two cents:

Being that these are mission critical machines I would stick to stable repos alone. The debian stable repos are rock solid and dependable. Another thing to think about is maybe a spare machine running as a file/backup server. You could test updates on this machine to look for issues before you set them loose in the office. Keep you files on a different partition/drive so if you bork it again your stuff is safe.

/$0.02

Good stuff, especially the suggestion to have a back up. We'd been backing up our files, but on one of the working portables, the PC would make more sense because there is no router/networking issue.

Please understand that we are a new, growing small school and that we're learning on the fly as we go along. Up until just this past December we had only one computer in this department. lol Now it's 5 and we're committed to linux by vote. Getting the distro right for several old machines of varying hardware was a bit of a chore, but a fun chore in most ways.

Thanks again.