Upgrade to Debian testing hosed my system

[Matt Graham]

From: Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>
> There was an ATI Rage 128 video card in the system, and the the newer
> Debians do not have the radeon drivers.

That shouldn't have caused any problems.  Rage 128 cards use the r128 X
module, not the radeon one.  Why is Debian not including the radeon modules? 
That just seems weird and counterproductive, since so many machines out there
have video cards driven by that module.  And if it's headless, it should
probably be starting up without X, in a VGA text console or vesafb, so that
the video card is completely irrelevant.

> However, the system hangs when trying to start network services.
> [10.184481] e1000: eth0 NIC Link is UP 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow
> Control: RX/TX
> [10.187930] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
> 
> Then nothing is printed out and the system does not respond.
> The card is the internal NIC - I don't have any extra cards in the
> machine.

Take a random PCI NIC you have lying around.  Put that NIC in the machine.  Go
into the machine's BIOS Setup and disable the internal NIC.  If you do that,
and the thing boots normally, then the machine's internal NIC is hosed.  BTDT.
 NIC failure *can* happen, it's just sort of rare since there aren't any
moving parts.

Or the new kernel has some sort of weird bug with its e1000 module.  Distro
kernels seem to have more weird bugs than vanilla kernels, for some reason. 
You could test this by booting with the rescue system's option for "no
network", then if it comes up, and you modprobe e1000 and it immediately locks
up, that may be the problem.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see