Non working NIC

[Doug Hardie]

> On 26 August 2016, at 21:16, David Christensen <dpchrist at holgerdanske.com> wrote:
> 
> On 08/26/2016 01:52 PM, Doug Hardie wrote:
>> ... I don't see a way to upgrade without a working network.  This is a backup machine that backs up numerous others so the data on there is huge and is not easily replaced.  I don't have another drive large enough to hold it. ...  bsdinstall will wipe out the drive.  So, any ideas how to do the upgrade?  I am out of ideas at the moment.
> 
> I came in late on this thread.  It sounds like your backup machine has
> one HDD with OS, applications, and data?
> 
> 
> How about unplug your HDD, get a 16 GB SSD, do a fresh install of
> whatever OS you want, and then reconnect the HDD as a data drive?

That would definitely work.  However, I am not interested in dumping money into this as its not my machine.  I did some reading on freebsd-update and there is a rollback option.  I tried it.  It works.  I got back to a working 9.1 system that has working NICs.  I then did an upgrade to 9.3 which continued to work.  Then I did an upgrade to 11.0-RC2.  Once again, no network interfaces.  There is something amiss with the i386 networking.  I am going to rollback again so that I can try the next release unless someone has some ideas on how to debug this situation.