Ritorno da Venezia (2)

One frustrating problem took me two days to properly settle when coming back from Venezia: when visiting Ca’ Foscari, my computer needed a hard IP number and I thus used NetworkManager (associated with my gutsy 7.10 release of Kubuntu) to do this, moving to the manual configuration option. When I came back, I tried to switch back to the automatic configuration but, while my computer was indeed connecting to the network, it was (a) unable to move to an Ethernet connection while on a wireless connection and (b) not showing the networks under NetworkManager… I eventually had to play with the entries in /etc/network/interfaces until things worked properly, commenting most entries into

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
address 127.0.0.1
netmask 255.0.0.0

# The primary network interface
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0

I actually remember having similar problems each time I had to use a fixed port, but this happens so rarely that I simply forget between two occurrences…