I have a DSL network connection, which is really nice fast, at least inside Japan, if it works. Luckily unlike my previous provider at the dorm, who would randomly cut off my net for days without warning if i left the torrent client on for a bit too long, there are no problems on the provider’s side. There are smaller ones on mine though. I have to manually connect whenever i boot Windows, but i never really bothered to look deeper into it, since it only happens once or twice a week. However, under Ubuntu the problems are quite different.

After i upgraded and then reinstalled the 11.10 o-something version, i faced some problems i couldn’t really handle. First it was the “waiting for network configuration” thing mentioned in the earlier post, but that went away after the reinstall and home folder wipe. But then there were other problems. It wouldn’t or only partially load certain pages (without any connection to each other, such as Rakuten and Tumblr) although i could ping and netcat them, it wouldn’t connect to MSN and in general it was slow. I rebooted to Windows to check, and found that everything worked all right, thus confirmed that it was an Ubuntu thing. I checked every setting in the network config manager gui, but none had any effect.

Then i remembered that there was “pppoeconf”, and gave it a try. At first it had no effect at all. Then i rebooted and the fun started. The “waiting for network configuration” message greeted me at boottime, staying there for minutes. At least from yesterday’s experience i knew that it would eventually move on. It did. The system booted up, but there was no network connection. The network manager right click menu said “device not managed”, and at first i had no idea how to connect. Then i remembered that at the last config screen pppoeconf said something about using “pon” and “poff” to turn the connection on and off respectively, and i gave it a try. Eventually “sudo pon dsl-provider” did the trick, and it worked as a charm. The pages that wouldn’t load earlier and MSN worked as well.

But still the network manager applet showed “device not managed” (i guess it gets turned off when that “wait for network configuration” at boot fails), so i googled a bit and found a way to turn it back on. At the next reboot, the network manager had my connection there all right, but again the pages wouldn’t load. Another reboot turned it off again and after “pon” it now works all right again.

I thought of removing the network manager applet from the tray since it’s no use this way, but i couldn’t find a simple enough way and i can’t be bothered to hack anymore today.