Had a ok 10.1 setup which broke when I upgraded to current using slapt-get --dist-upgrade.

Problem is that I cannot access internet although I can ping the router (I have adsl) and the home network still works fine. Trying to ping a nameserver gives network unreachable error. The problem is not resolved by running netconfig.

Weirdly, if I drop back to run level 1, then back up to run level 4, the problem disappears.

Clearly some configuration is not being read on boot up, yet I don't spot any relevant error message.

Any ideas anyone?

Does the route command show a default gateway?
Try running /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1
At one stage one of the "current" updates broke networking, but this was fixed several weeks ago

Thanks davidsrsb, you found the problem area.

There was no default gateway until I did the telinit 1; telinit4 thing. Running rc.inet1 also brings up the gateway.

I'll run rc.inet1 from rc.local for now, but any ideas for a clean fix for this?

The Lan port is an onboard NVIDEA MAC + Realtek 8201BL PHY; it worked without any fiddling on the 10.1 setup.

When you upgraded, you did update the rc files in /etc/rc.d ?
(update the init scripts with the .new ?)

No, I didn't realize it was necessary to update rc.d files manually.

However this does not help the problem

What are the versions of the following packages?
udev
tcpip
sysvinit

I have the up to date packages from current

sysvinit-2.84-i486-56
tcpip-0.17-i486-34
udev-064-i486-2

Am thinking of doing upgrade to 2.6 kernel, might the problem go away with this?

problem now solved by a recompiled 2.4 kernel

I suspect that compiling in nForce Ethernet support, rather than having it built as a module did the trick.

Thanks for help received

The scripts were changed to get rc.inet1 to run after a nic was found and module loaded. Maybe this has introduced a bug when the nic is precompiled into the kernel.