[CALUG] 10.04 broke my wireless and ssh

[Sean Wilkerson]

Ed,

# Fresh Install
I agree with the John who said a fresh install might fix this problem.
One of the fantastic features of Debian-based systems (This includes
Ubuntu) is their upgradeability.  This is particularly useful and
manageable on servers.  Unfortunately, the upgrade doesn't always work
well when in laptop/desktop environments.  The problem is, during an
upgrade your package manager attempts to bring each piece of software up
to the latest rev and attempts to maintain any user-configured settings.
 In a laptop/desktop you have many packages that are closely aligned
with your hardware.  This is not the case with most server installs.

During a fresh install, the system hardware would be evaluated to
determine the best drivers and packages to support them.
Between your $PREVIOUS and $CURRENT version, there may have been changes
in the driver used for your hardware that wasn't just an upgrade of the
package.  A fresh-install would re-evaluate your hardware and attempt to
load the best match.

# Before Fresh Install
Before you go through the effort of reinstall, run the Ubuntu liveCD and
find out a few things:
- Is your hardware's wireless adapter discovered?
- Does it work?
- If so, what driver does it use?

Once you are armed with this info, go back to your upgraded Ubuntu
instance, and attempt to load the driver discovered with the liveCD.
This might be enough to get around your network problem.

# SSH Issue
This is an entirely different story and should not be as impacted by
driver (IMHO).
A few points:
- You didn't provide very much detail, so please respond if this is the
wrong track
- The logs you provided are netfilter logs showing the firewall LOGGED
the tcp/22 connection.  Without seeing the firewall policy we don't know
if this was DROPPED or ACCEPTED.  Run 'iptables --list' and see if
ssh/22 is listed.  If not, this log entry may have been part of your
explicit "DROP" rule near the end of your policy.
- Aside from a firewall issue:
-- Do a 'netstat -an | grep LISTEN | grep -v ING' and see if you see 22
open/bound.
-- Can you ssh to yourself from the host in question?
-- What does a packet capture show (I would use something like: 'tcpdump
-nnvvi eth0 port 22'
-- From a remote system do you see the port available at all?

# Soapbox on Upgrades and Partitions on Linux
- I have many linux distros install on my laptop (primary work/life system)
- use an LVM for each "root" filesystem to install
-- For test distros I make these 4GB and if it will be a primary distro
I make it 6GB.
- I have an LVM for each:
-- /home/my
-- my media (music, pics, movies)
-- my work
-- my data/backups
-- my special dirs
- For each linux distro, I copy-past my cutom /etc/fstab (uses UUIDs and
not DM names) file into that dist to have all of my data/info be
available when/where I need it
- Here is my process of doing a fresh install (it takes abt 25 min)
-- Boot laptop to install media (With Ubuntu use the alternate installer
NOT the live installer)
-- Do normal install until partitioning.  During partitioning, create
new LVM under existing (discovered) volume group.  Install OS there and
then install kernel to existing /boot (default).  Ensure no other
partitions are touched.
-- Boot
-- Note: The Ubuntu installer will rename everything in your grub.conf
to point to the new distro kernel version.  I maintain this file
separately and will replace it and hand-edit to add the new
kernel/distro in when necessary.

The end-result is, that I can "try-out" a new version in less than 30
min.  Using this method, you can do an LVM copy (dd) and attempt an
upgrade to see the effect on your system/applications.

I have been working this way for many years and think it provides me
lots of independence and *choice* which is what Linux is all about.

Let me know if you need more details.

Sean

On 06/01/2010 01:38 PM, John L. Cunningham wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 09:53:56AM -0700, Ed Browne wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>     I did the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 as soon as it came
>> out, and a couple of problems spontaneously appear which
>> I can't seem to resolve.
> 
> Did you really upgrade, or did you do a fresh install?  Upgrades can
> cause problems such as you describe, and they take ages to resolve if
> you try to hunt them down.  My advice would be to do a fresh install.  I
> would not be surprised if your problems disappear.
> 
> John
> 
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