This afternoon I wanted to experiment with how I can connect the Gosund WiFi electrical sockets to HomeKit. Unfortunately while I was attempting to do so, I installed packages that corrupted my Linux kernel and removed my network interface.
This is of course a huge inconvenience. After a reboot, I found the media server to not have any networking. The only network interface that it recognized was lo (the loop back interface 127.0.0.1).
When I performed a:
sudo lshw -C network
The network card was recognized but was UNCLAIMED. This obviously raised alarm bells and indicated to me that the kernel was some how not recognizing the card.
I had to download a version of Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 LTS on a USB drive and proceeded to live boot from it. Luckily the live boot recognize the network card and I was able to get networking.
Before I can perform any rescue activities, I had to mount the old root file system and chroot to it by taking the following steps:
# Boot the Ubuntu Live CD. # Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys sudo chroot /mnt # Add the following lines into /etc/resolv.conf after you use chroot: nameserver 208.67.222.222 nameserver 208.67.220.220
I then needed to restore the kernel by executing the following:
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04
After another reboot, the server is back to its old self.