I’ve generally had good luck with hardware and things just worked under linux. But one day I upgraded a few machines on my network to 2.5G ethernet. Several already had the ports, but my little NUC NAS box didn’t, so I installed a 2.5G usb ethernet dongle. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work. It would show up and NM would act like it was up and there were no errors or anything, but it just wouldn’t actually function.

Eventually, I found out that it has a built in USB data partition that contains the drivers for windows. The card was coming up as a usb disk first when the hardware was assigned and not a network card which it should have been.

I had to write a blacklist the usb modules first, which I had done before, but I had to also write a udev rule to automatically add the network card and driver on boot. It wasn’t that difficult to actually do, but I had just never had to do anything with udev rules before. Took me a good three days of troubleshooting to finally get everything to work correctly on boot.

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="20f4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="e02c", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe r8152" RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 20f4 e02c > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/r8152/new_id'"

The sound of the “Click of Death” still haunts me.

We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.

If you disable the Ethernet/WiFI then you can create a local account, but you have to do a small.extra step…

press SHIFT+F10 keys to open Command Prompt.

Run the following: OOBE\BYPASSNRO

After this, setup will reboot the computer and you’ll get a new option I don’t have Internet or Continue with limited setup to skip the Internet requirement and you can create a local account as well.

At some point, the people of Afghanistan should be able to take control of their own country. How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone? Kick the Taliban out of your country.

I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean now?