Last night the power co had to take down our line temporarily, so I shutdown my server.

 

This morning I powered up and didn't see the server on the network so I logged in locally and ran ifconfig. Only the loopback adapter showed, and trying to ifconfig eth0 resulted in "error fetching interface information, device not found." The server has been running in this exact configuration for over a year, and with this hardware for 3+ years through multiple power cycles.

 

I rebooted twice and switched the network cable and port, just to make sure it wasn't something simple. The network interface has both solid link  and blinking ack. On the chance that something fried in the onboard NIC on power cycle, I installed a known-good PCI NIC and still no joy. Checked eth0 and eth1 with ifconfig after the new card was installed.

 

I feel like I'm overlooking something simple. Suggestions?

 

(note: I'm running 4.5.1; don't judge - it's been rock stable for me)

 

 

Okay, the rabbit hole just got deeper.

 

[skipping about 8 reboots and attempts to get sysinfo]

 

The system had stopped recognizing anything on the flash drive after boot (ls -a returns . and .. on /boot), and had somehow loaded up in a default configuration with no password (I used to have one, now I can login with root and no pass)

 

And now, finally, the system won't boot at all.  I can still read the USB drive in my win PC - and it looks the same each time I check -  but it appears the server can't see it. Is it possible for windows to be able to see the directory structure, but not linux?

 

Have you run chkdsk on your Usb drive in Windows? Give that a try.

Thanks. The drive checks out under windows, and the hidden ldlinux.sys is (still) present. I'm going to have to  take a step back and take another look at this problem as nothing is letting me bring up the server. Even two other (v5) flash drives I have (I've been building a new server for ~4 months on an off) result in a "no DEFAULT or UI configuration found"

 

Best I close this thread as non-useful since the error does not appear to be a eth0 problem.