Without NM, you can take a look at /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless, and /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf. I'm assuming you are connecting to something with this. These end up running wpa_supplicant.

Finally! lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 07)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 10)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 10)
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 10)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake Mobile PCH SATA AHCI Controller (rev 10)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f0)
00:1d.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #14 (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO UART Host Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM470 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 10fa (rev a1)
06:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Sandisk Corp WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD (rev 01)
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)

Thanks for being patient

These two devices above should work out of the box with kernel 5.7 and newer.
I think you are running kernel 5.10?

At the cli run this command below and post it:
/sbin/ifconfig

5.15.1, to be exact. Maybe I'm not starting it all up correctly. Like I said earlier, I've never had to deal with networking not working....not even way back when it was UUCP.

In fact, If I had any money, I'd bet that I'm not doing it right, because Network Manager doesn't stay open (the little network icon in Xfce tells me it isn't working, and "start network manager" is greyed out, right after I try to start it.

Thanks

Try disabling Network Manager.
List the Network interfaces the running kernel may already have enabled with this command below:
/sbin/ifconfig

(12:52) # ifconfig -a

eth0: flags=4098<BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether f8:75:a4:66:94:13 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

lo: flags=8<LOOPBACK> mtu 65536
loop txqueuelen 1000 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

wlan0: flags=4098<BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 24:41:8c:e3:84:ab txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

(12:53) # iwconfig



wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=off
Retry short limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementn

wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=off
Retry short limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementn

Ok, how do I turn smilies off so they don't keep doing that?

Stop Network-Manager with:
/etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager stop

Connect an ethernet cable to the eth0 interface and to a functioning switchport on your switch/router and then wait for the interface to acquire an ip address.
If after a couple of seconds there is no ip address acquired by eth0, then try:
/sbin/dhclient -4 eth0 -v

It appears to be a combination of issues:

1) During that severe thunderstorm a few Saturdays ago,a network port (Cat 6) was damaged. I'd been assuming that it was the one on my laptop. That must have been wrong, because I used a different port on my router and it worked fine. In fact, I'm typing this from my laptop, not my tablet.

2) Starting Network Manager alone didn't do anything. That little network icon on the top panel kept saying that network manager was down, networking was disabled, etc. That last command, /sbin/dhclient -4 eth- -v, is what brought the networks back up,but not dns.

3) Once again (I have yet to figure out why it keeps getting overwritten) I had to replace /etc/resolv.conf with /etc/resolv.conf.backup. the one that has two pendns servers listed in it (they used to have three..I wonder what happened?). I have Internet now with dns. I can ping google.com and my JStrack site, jstrack.org - https://jstrack.org/jsttack/ for JStrack, itself, if you need a freeware, highly rated 100% free (It's all Tcl/Tk, so you have the source if you want to enhance something and send me the patch, but the source is under my copyright) hurricane tracking system.

Question, would I use that same command to make the Wifi adapter start again? Or is there a different command to start it up (obviously wlan0 instead of eth0....beyond that)?

I am having to wake up every tab on Firefox (and I use the tab stacks extension that hides inactive tab groups, and an extension that shuts down inactive tabs), so I'm not surprised.

Anyways, networking is back up! THANKS EVERYONE!

Marking this topic as solved. If something else comes along, I'll start a new topic.