Apologies for spamming this with a very specific hardware issue - but I felt this was so unusual, that it was worth sharing the kind-of solution.
I have an old 386 running Solaris, works fine. I swapped the VGA monitor it, didn't think much of it. VGA is VGA right? (except old Compaq 286SLT have one of the VGA pins removed, but that's another story) The replacement monitor (19" Sun from c. 2001) worked fine. Booted system, logged in. But - I Couldn't ping. No networking. Checked the router. Check switch, all green lights. TV streaming still working. No one else in the house screaming about no internet. Hmm... But I couldn't ping out of that 386, nor FTP back into it, like I had been. I consulted GPT on its thoughts. I swapped NIC cables, VGA cables, long cables, short cables, moved the power brick of the 19" Dell. All same result. Finally, GPT made this comment, that I'll summarize like this: "If your NIC isn't working, try turning off your monitor." I figured another dumb AI hallucination. But holy smokes, that actually worked! It was a pure 1:1 correlation - whenever I turned that 19" Sun monitor off, I could ping out of the box and ftp into it. As soon as I powered it back on, all the network traffic stopped. It no fancy LCD - no speakers, no USB, just a typical VGA/DVI connector heavy LCD with a Sun Micro logo stamped on it. So the specific test was this: prep a ping command, like "ping 192.168.1.1" turn the monitor off, press ENTER. Wait 2 seconds, power the monitor back on. And yea, consistently, that worked. But when trying to ping while the monitor was left on, I couldn't ping from the NIC in this 386. GPT's only suggestion was some sort of grounding interference by this particular 19" Sun monitor, and some blah-blah about how old 386's are more impacted about EMI. Just curious what other think on this - any particular known issue about 2001-ish period Sun 19 flat-panel LCDs? This one uses a 19V DC power brick (and I tried using different outlets). I never would have considered trying to solve the NIC issue by powering off the monitor. So I have to put back on the widescreen for now - which everything works fine with that. So not a real solution, but I gotta admit that GPT did help uncover what was causing the issue. Cheers, Steve
