[NBLUG/talk] "Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0"

[Lincoln Peters]

Every so often, my parents' computer completely fails to connect to
the network (it may or may not show an IP address for eth0 when I run
ifconfig), and when I try to bring the network interface up or down, I
get the following error:

Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0

What makes it especially weird is that I've seen this exact same error
both before and after installing a new motherboard, including onboard
network Ethernet interface.  Usually, if I shut down the computer and
leave it off for at least several minutes, the Ethernet interface
starts working again, but simply rebooting has no effect.  However,
this time I shut down the computer and left it off overnight, and this
time it DIDN'T fix the problem.  Which leads to two questions:

1. What does that error mean?
2. What could be the root cause?
3. Could the computer be cursed?  (Err...don't answer that one.)

The computer is running the latest version of Kubuntu, and as of about
two months ago had all of the updates (obviously I can't easily update
it now).  As far as I'm aware, it doesn't have any unusual network
configuration aside from running a Samba server.  Searching Google for
the error message doesn't seem to yield any hints, at least not any
that make sense to me.


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<anfrind at gmail.com>