I’m not any closer to tracking down the network issue that hamstrung my Thinkpad the other day, and since I needed it to run Crux for work this week, it made little difference either way.

Now that I can return it to its normal duties, I had hoped whatever bug had bit me would have been squashed, but it didn’t work out that way. The newest kernel and the newest dhcpcd, freshly installed via FTP, just didn’t want to give me any love. I tried the SACK and DSACK tricks on the Arch Linux forums, but still no luck.

So I decided rather than continue to flop around without a network connection, like fish without water, I’d just install from the core CD and not update.

It’s working fine, of course. I’m running the 2.6.25 kernel that was installed off the Overlord core ISO and the 3-something version of dhcpcd, and while I synced with the repositories with pacman -Sy, I haven’t added the -u flag to that to trigger a systemwide update. I could, I suppose, tell pacman to ignore both the kernel and dhcpcd and do that systemwide update anyway, but I’m still not confident where the issue lies, and so I’m not keen on smashing a system by installing the mystery package that eludes me. Call me shy

So anyway, until I can be sure where the problem lies, and how to fix it, I can run without a full upgrade. No ground lost, everything is still Arch-fast and working fine.