Hello all.
A few days ago I attempted to create a Samba share on my Tumbleweed (Plasma de) system so that my receiver could play music files directly over the network.
As it wasn’t possible to share a folder with Dolphin, I used YaST Samba configuration.
In the configuration window I noticed a few pre-configured shares and thought “what’s this doing here and why?”
Knowing me, it’s not unlikely that I disabled these shares or poked around a bit, thinking they had no business being there since they were not created by me.
Unfortunately I don’t recall precisely what I did apart from creating the intended share and allowing the Samba service in YaST firewall configuration.
Not long after that my system’s network connectivity became limited to the local network.
DNS resolution and pinging any IP address outside the LAN both stopped working.
Naturally my first assumption was that the system’s network configuration got borked as a result of my apelike curiosity and frantic clicking in settings without really understanding their purpose.
After fruitlessly searching the internet for solutions I disabled the firewall in YaST and tried restoring the Samba configuration to it’s previous state.
This had no effect.
I then had a peek at the journalctl log to see if anything obvious jumped out.
There were numerous red marked entries about curl core dumps.
For instance AirVPN’s Eddie application kept repeating that curl was required. Funny thing is, Eddie wasn’t even supposed to be installed anymore and wasn’t listed in the application launcher.
But it got me thinking… The VPN software has a network lock function to prevent anything from accessing the internet when the VPN is disconnected. What if, who knows how, some part of Eddie remained on my system and suddenly started causing problems?
Since the application’s GUI was not around anymore, I reinstalled it completely from the .rpm file and had a look at the settings.
It seemed my previously used settings were still in effect, including the network lock. So I disabled that function and also allowed both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic outside a tunnel, thinking this was the culprit.
Unfortunately this had no effect either.
On top of that, several other things had stopped working as well.
Zypper for example. Any zypper command would immediately spawn a bunch of curl core dumps.
Same thing with Plasma’s Discover. So I basically couldn’t even reinstall, remove or install any packages.
Launching qBittorrent resulted in a screen full of popup messages about who knows what and a frozen system, but I’ll bet they involved curl.
Trying to do anything with curl directly inevitably failed as well with more log entries about core dumps, which by the way I have no idea what it means.
So it appears that not just network related settings got garbled.
From what I was able to assess with my limited knowledge of Linux it appears curl somehow broke, thus rendering anything depending on it completely inoperable.
While searching the internet for possible causes I came across some suggestions related to DNS issues, and what do you know… While a ping command failed to resolve any domain names, the ‘host’ and ‘dig’ commands both succeeded.
So now I’m truly puzzled.
Next thing I tried was restoring a Tumbleweed snapshot from before this total clusterfudge but again, it didn’t fix anything.
So, an even earlier snapshot maybe… and an earlier one still. No result.
And this is where I’m at my wits end.
Aside from just biting the bullet and doing a complete reinstall I have absolutely no clue what could be done to recover from this.
Fearing that a fresh installation will be required I made backups of everything important to me, but before I actually proceed I thought throwing this out here may be worth a shot.
If anyone has a suggestion, I’ll gladly try it. Seeing as this installation has been rendered useless I don’t really care if it breaks completely. Might even learn a thing or two from it…
Thank you very much for your patience so far. I’m curious to see if anybody has any idea what might have gone wrong (besides me being a bit of an ape sometimes…)
