[Techtalk] Help!

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 12:28:03PM -0500 or thereabouts, Samantha Blackmon wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 March 2002 12:14 pm, a magikal owl from bsweeney delivered this 
> message:
> > Samantha wrote:
> > >Today I ran RH's up2date program in order to take care
> > >of the security alert they emailed me about. Stayed

Ye gods, I really should catch up with updates. Every time
I am up to date, another one comes out.

> > >Then I find that
> > >I am not connected to the net (I have DSL) even though
> > >I was and still am on the windows side. OK, reboot.
> > >Boot into the old version...no sound server error.
> > >Good sign or so I thought. Still no internet
> > >connection! Does anyone have an idea of why this is
> > >happening??

[many excellent suggestions snipped]
> > Hope something in that long ramble helps!
> >
> > -Brian
> 
> I am almost embarrassed to admit this but it seems that 
> with the upgrade my config files had been wiped clean. 

Ohh. I've met "Where have my beautiful config files gone?"
before.  Have a look to see whether as well as the /etc/foo.conf 
there is a /etc/foo.conf.rpmsave. I'm guessing they're in
/etc. Most config files are. 

RH commonly backs up global configuration files in upgrades
via rpm. (It won't touch stuff in home directories.) For
things like /etc/lynx.cfg, it will put a new one there and
save the old one as lynx.cfg.rpmsave. For things like 
/etc/passwd (not a good example, but I can't think of a 
better one), it would be a very bad idea to rewrite it and
put the new version as the default, so they leave it alone
and put the new version as .rpmnew.

So you may have the originals saved. If you haven't, I
would file a bug against whatever package wiped it out.
You can find out by doing "rpm -qf /etc/whateverfile.conf".

> Once I had it all reset I rebooted to give it a chance to 
> find a new IP (I use DCHP) because I do not yet know the 
> linux equivalent for "ipconfig /renew".

I don't use DHCP. But I do know that RH has a tool for it:

       pump  - configure network interface via BOOTP or DHCP 
       protocol

You might have a look at that? 

Telsa