Discover Network Driver Name
Instead of restarting the computer after network issues, it can be much more practical to just restart the card, that is, add and remove the kernel module. But, for that, we first need to know the driver’s name.
Discover the interface names by looking at the first column of ifconfig:
$ ifconfig -s
Iface MTU RX-OK RX-ERR RX-DRP RX-OVR TX-OK TX-ERR TX-DRP TX-OVR Flg
enp2s0 1500 101565 0 0 0 54380 0 0 0 BMRU
lo 65536 26832 0 0 0 26832 0 0 0 LRU
wlp1s0 1500 868562 0 0 0 595601 0 0 0 BMRU
Then use ethtool to discover the driver’s name:
$ ethtool -i enp2s0
driver: atl1c
version: 1.0.1.1-NAPI
firmware-version:
bus-info: 0000:02:00.0
supports-statistics: no
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no
$ ethtool -i wlp1s0
driver: iwlwifi
version: 3.9.5-1-ARCH
firmware-version: 8.83.5.1 build 33692
bus-info: 0000:01:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: no
supports-priv-flags: no
Restart the module using modprobe:
sudo modprobe -r atl1c
sudo modprobe atl1c
I’m a Brazilian computer engineer based in Germany, passionate about tech, science, photography, and languages.
I’ve been programming for about two decades already, exploring everything from mobile apps and web development to machine learning. These days I focus on cloud SRE and data engineering.
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