Le Potato eth port stopped working

My Le Potato’s ethernet port does not appear to be working as of today. I have a persistent solid amber light regardless of whether or not it is plugged in.

I have tried different patch cables.
I have tried different switch ports as well as entirely different switches.
I have switched power supplies.

The OS is booting, it detects the interface, but shows no-carrier. I’m not sure what, if any, troubleshooting is available to me on the hardware itself.

Edit: Switch port shows link down as well.

Did you make any changes to the system or setup either software or hardware when this happened?

No. It’s main role is as an Octoprint server. It sits in a little PLA enclosure I printed for it. Before today I haven’t physically touched it in at least 6 months. It had been sitting powered off for the last week or so since I haven’t been printing. I’m careful to shut the OS down before I remove power and that’s handled by a switched power supply so I’m not pulling cables all the time.

I powered it up to apply system updates, which I try to do monthly, but wasn’t able to get that far since the network was down.

Worked fine the last time I used it.

I’m hoping to find out if there is any kind of diagnostic I can do to identify the problem or if this is likely a lost cause?

Try reflashing the bootloader to the MicroSD card. There were some upstream changes to MDIO. If the bootloader on the MicroSD card is really old, that could be one cause. It will show up as no-link so it is probably the cause of your issues.

The boot loader is old, for sure. I still haven’t re-flashed it since the last time you told me to, to disable the watchdog.

Does GitHub - libre-computer-project/libretech-flash-tool require Linux with hardware access to the a flash drive? Worst case I can spin up a VM on my laptop and attach the flash drive to it, was hoping for a simpler solution.

Thanks

You don’t need to. You can just add the “force” flag at the end to flash the running image on your board. You do not need another machine.

I’m open to suggestions on how to use the flash tool without a working network.

sudo ./lft.sh bl-flash aml-s905x-cc mmcblk1 force

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Had a small adventure using an Ubuntu live CD on my laptop. (The flash script detected the internal HD but not the MMC device, I had to force it.)

I’ll admit, I was skeptical but that worked. I have a working nic on my potato again. Stupid question but shouldn’t the green light also be on, on the ethernet port?

Early on this board took a 24V hit due to a bad buck converter and I’ve always assumed I was on borrowed time. I really appreciate the help.

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This worked perfect. for easy, I logged in under the older kernel downloaded lft.sh and libs, Ran as described and rebooted. I’m now on the latest kernel without issues. Thanks, The network lights don’t work as before but I’m assuming you maybe working on that for the next release.