I am running Ubuntu 11.10. We had a severe thunderstorm last night, and the Ethernet (ETH0) port has stopped working. The LED is red, and the light on the modem doesn’t come on.
The ASUS motherboard has a 2nd Ethernet port. When I plug the cable in, the LED goes yellow, and the modem shows a the green LED. But I can’t seem to get connected.
When I ping the modem, I get a ‘Network unreachable’. When I look at network settings, it says the cables are unplugged for both ports.
How can I get Ubuntu run a wizard to recognise & setup the second Ethernet port?
vPerhaps you can control with the following
Wicd
http://wicd.sourceforge.net/
or
ifdown ethX,ifup ethX (X is the interface #)
Ubuntu Networking Configuration Using Command Line
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-networking-configuration-using-command-line.html
Have you tried the modem and port using a different computer yet? During a thunderstorm it is (more) likely that the modem got damaged via an overload coming from the WAN side.
Unless you setup a static IP the ethernet interface will reset by just doing a reboot. As for the second port it is possible that it's using a different chipset which wasn't identified during the Ubuntu installation
I suggest to open up the terminal and run "ifconfig -a" to see if there are two interfaces identified (eth0, eth1).