Help wanted: Bizzare ethernet non-functionality

  • For a long time, I have been using a Zotac Zbox BI320 as my livingroom media player with LibreELEC. I works great. Recently, I found another use for that box, so I bought a second one off fleaBay. It is also a BI320 and thus identical in essentially every respect to the original BI320.

    I am a cheapskate, so I've been booting LibreELEC on the older BI320 from a SanDisk USB 3.0 stick... not that that matters to my story.

    For connectivity, I have the BI320 hardwired to a Linksys WUMC710 media connector which supplies connectivity to all of my livingroom media things.

    So, I took delivery of this second BI320, and I put it exactly where the original one was, wired it all up exactly like the original BI320 and booted it from the same USB 3.0 stick as I was using before with the other BI320.

    It booted OK, but now, none of my NFS shares are working. So, I mean, what the hell? I took the newer BI320 into my workshop, booted Ubuntu on it, and verified that the ethernet on it is working just fine.

    When LibreELEC gets installed onto a USB stick, or onto whatever, does that process LOCK the installation to a specific ethernet MAC address? That's the only theory that I can come up with as to why the installed LibreELEC on the USB stick works just fine in all respects on my original BI320 but seems to be unable to do anything with the (verified working) ethernet port when the same USB stick is inserted into the newer BI320, which is in all respects, identical to the original one, except for the MAC address, of course.

  • NEVERMIND!

    It appears that, for reasons I am none too clear on, when I booted my old USB stick with LibreELEC on it on the newer BI320, for some reason the network settings got magically switched to (dynamic) DHCP rather than the static IP that I had previously had the network set to. And since the NFS exports from my file server are limited and accessible only from a small number of IPs on the local network, and since DHCP caused the new BI320 to dynamically get assigned an IP outside of the allowed IP address range for my NFS shares, those NFS exports were coming up as being inaccessible.

    Manually setting the network again to use a static IP within the range permitted to access my NFS exports over on the file server seems to have made everything good again.