On my armbian-Debian desktop, right upper corner, there is the dropdown icon - shows my internet connections.

It has “enable networking & enable wifi”. I ‘unchecked’ them so that they are NOT enabled. But when I look below at the printout for “ip addr”, for ‘eth0 & eth0.2, it shows “state up” for both.

DOESN’T THAT MEAN THAT MY NETWORK INTERFACES FOR THE ETHERNET CONNECTIONS ARE ACTIVE “NOT” DISABLED? I printed it out results for both “ip addr” & “ifconfig -a”.

............................

~$ ip addr

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default
link/loopback
inet
inet6
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether
inet
inet6
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/ether

6: eth0.2@eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default
link/ether
inet
inet6
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

.............................................................

~$ ifconfig -a

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet
inet6 addr:
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:936 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:534 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:98919 (98.9 KB) TX bytes:63864 (63.8 KB)
Interrupt:114

eth0.2 Link encap:Ethernet
inet addr:
inet6 addr:
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:427 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:418 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:30546 (30.5 KB) TX bytes:33618 (33.6 KB)

eth0:avahi Link encap:Ethernet
inet addr:
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Interrupt:114

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:
inet6 addr: :
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:12938 (12.9 KB) TX bytes:12938 (12.9 KB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Thanks.

state up does not necessarily mean that there's a connection to the internet.
I think you can trust what network-manager tells you here.

and do not confuse command line networking stuff with network-manager; the latter doesn't like it.

Thanks.

Sometimes when i 'disable networking' from the dropdown menu, I see that 'ip addr' says 'state up' but other times it says 'state down'. This is a longshot, but could someone being remotely connected to my computer, via hijacking the browser, have anything to do with it?

Thanks.

I just answered that question in my previous post.
But no, I don't think someone could remotely activate the internet connection on your computer. Any sort of remote hijacking I know of requires an already working internet connection.