elyograg

The WAN port is back to eth0 now.

Today there was a new firmware package. After reboot, the LAN interface is gone again. A power cycle did not help.

In the last few months, some upgrades would break the port and others would fix it. One of the recent upgrades I made was to update to kernel 6.0 ... since then it looks like the LAN port has been there consistently. Curiously, the WAN port got renamed from eth0 to eth1 and that also seems to be consistent after every reboot. My netplan config does not have any network device names in it, so that name change doesn't break anything.

I started this journey with DietPi on a nanopi r4s. I asked about it on the DietPi forum, and they basically said "Our distro is a bunch of scripts on top of Armbian. We can't really help you with a kernel problem." So I reimaged with Armbian and I'm here now. Background with DietPi: When I first boot the DietPi image, the LAN port works. This is on kernel 5.10.63. Then as soon as I log into it via ssh on the IP address acquired by the LAN port, it proceeds to auto-upgrade software, including the kernel, which goes to 5.15.25. During the upgrade, I got messages saying a bunch of firmware for the r8169 driver was not there. Installing armbian-firmware-full gets rid of that error, but does not help. Once it reboots into the new kernel, the LAN port will not get link, and cannot even be seen by Linux. I cannot make it work no matter what I do. Some things I tried made the system unbootable. The WAN port does continue to work. So I grabbed the latest Armbian image for the r4s. When I boot that, the LAN port never works, but the WAN port works just fine. For what I am trying to do with the device, I need both ports working. I tried updating all the software on the system, including installing the -edge-rockchip64 linux packages. I just cannot make it work. Looking deeper into the dietpi initial boot with 5.10.63, I discovered that it loads the r8169 driver, but the newer versions don't.