Awkward! (Realtek RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller in "awkward" mode)
We hear new expressions from teens and twenty-somethings all the time - and they usually get real old real fast. But there is one semi(?) current expression that I like a lot - it's where kids say - often as a sing-song chorus - " AWKWARD " - in response to someone else describing a situation that is, well, awkward. Well, even though I basically do networking for a living, I'd never heard of "awkward" mode as applied to a Network Interface device like an Ethernet adapter. Promiscuous mode, yes. But awkward mode no. That is until yesterday. Here's what happened. My dual boot machine (Win7, Fedora Core 14) was running Windows 7 and there were some Win 7 OS updates that I said yes to. I was later able to verify that one of these updates did include a driver update for the Realtek PCI Gigabit Ethernet onboard NIC. Things were working fine, I left and I guess the updates installed themselves. When I returned there was no network connectivity. Not i...