A while ago, I installed Fedora Core 5 on my server. The only problem I had was that my gigabit ethernet card wouldn’t work for some reason. It was really frustrating because my Mac has a gigabit controller, and I wanted to be able to transfer files between the two really fast. Instead, I had to settle for using the on-board 10/100 controller.

Well, the strangest thing happened today. I was logged into my server via ssh when, all of a sudden, I lost my connection. I had no idea what happened. I couldn’t even ping it.

When I got home I tried accessing it from inside the LAN. Still no go, so I hauled it out of the closet and hooked up a monitor to see if I could figure out what was wrong. No LAN connection. WTF?? Just for fun, I tried plugging the ethernet cable into the gigabit jack. It worked!

I hadn’t worked on that in a couple months. I’ve done a couple kernel updates since then, but I didn’t bother trying it. There must have been some update that fixed my problem. The strangest thing though, is that the built in controller stopped working today out of the blue. The link light comes on when I plug a cable into it, but I can’t connect to the LAN.

I just put it back in the closet, closed the door, and backed away slowly. Oh, I put a 40 gigger in for backups first.

Better sacrifice a floppy drive to the Linux gods before they get angry and take away my gigabit again.