The strangest thing happened, I rebooted my RevA5 Beaglebone, and the /etc/network folder disappeared! I don’t know where it went, or why it is no longer there. I do know that I cannot type in commands to bring up eth0 without it. I tried re-making two SD cards with the image from 6-18, and they both behave the same way.
The green light on the switch is on when the Beaglebone is connected, but the Beaglebone itself behaves strangely: the ethernet lights (green and orange) are on when the cable is unplugged, and the lights are off when the cable is plugged in. Strangely enough, the router does detect that there is something there, and it tries to assign the Beaglebone the same IP address that it had earlier in the night when it was working. Instead of the hostname “beaglebone”, it only lists a “*”, and I am never able to ping to Beaglebone from my PC.
Has anyone else seen this problem? I have read about the mode select issue, where pin 14 is connected to 3.3V instead of pin 15, setting the phy chip into mode 011, which is auto-negotiate disabled. Will adding a pull-up to U11 pin 15 solve this? I can’t tell if this is a hardware or software problem. It seems like software, since the light on the router comes on, but it also seems like hardware, since the lights are acting funny.