elisatems wrote:
WiFi has ALWAYS been a thorn in my side with this, since the /etc/fstab entry on Linux is based on a local fixed IP address, and if WiFi is running, the Linux box often does not see the Mac's ethernet interface but only the WiFi.
To be honest, one thing to try would be WiFi instead of ethernet. Modern WiFi is going to be faster than all but the most hard-core ethernet. In theory, ethernet is going to be more stable and reliable than a radio signal, but not a Mac. Ethernet just doesn't get the Apple love.
Yes, as I said above, this is a way that things have broken before, but it is not the problem this time - at least not the multiple interfaces. But yes, the Mac is connected via a USB ethernet dongle, in fact through a USB hub because the USB ports on this 2021 MBP are so few. That is frequently a problem when switching devices, since I have to disconnect the dongle to do that (I also have my home directory on an external SSD drive). But it never causes the ethernet connection to outright fail once established. This setup also predates even Sequoia, never mind 15.6.
Debugging these things can be tricky. It's not always straightforward. It doesn't matter that something stopped working when you applied the 15.6 update. It could have always been wrong and you were just lucky before.
At a bare minimum, even if you do nothing else at all, you absolutely must connect the ethernet dongle directly. This is not negotiable. It might not help, but you must try. This is an absolute non-starter. Nowhere in the constitution does it say you have a right to a connection through a USB hub. Disconnect the hub - completely.
And remember, what little love Apple gives to ethernet is exclusive to those Apple devices that include built-in ethernet. With a 3rd party dongle going through a 3rd party hub, you have three different companies that will be more than happy to blame the others. None of them will make the slightest effort of any kind.
And I'm not done. You must also disconnect every single other external hardware device. There are widespread reports of interference and cross-talk between radio waves, bluetooth, and even hard-wired USB. These things always start with OS updates. Your description of changing nothing but the OS version is an absolutely textbook example. I realize it's frustrating. While you do have options, they aren't the options that you think you have. You have the option to make no changes and continue guessing about what the cause might be, or you can do a lot of work to try to find out. That work will require you to disassemble a substantial portion of your network.
Remember, you don't have to do that. You can always take the "guess" option. Maybe try SMB/WiFi and hope that something about that is going to be more resilient. That's why I keep suggesting it. You can test that, in a couple of minutes, without changing anything. Maybe it works. If not, then you have to keep looking, but if there's a 2 minute chance involving nothing but the keyboard, why not try it?
By "local export" do you mean exporting to the Mac and nfs-mounting the exported volume locally, on the Mac? I haven't tried that, in fact have never had occasion to try it even on Linux.
I just meant exporting a share from the startup drive instead of an external. At first, that's what I thought the problem was. I can setup an NFS export from /private/tmp, but not from an external. But I actually didn't even test keeping it running all day. Maybe my local connection would have gone stale too.
To be honest, as Mac user, I don't even use any file servers regularly. Network connections simply aren't reliable on modern macOS and haven't been for years. I realize sometimes people apply some random update and get upset that it breaks. But I've been in situations where I had top-of-the-line corporate hardware, with a full team of well-paid, full-time, truly competent network admin people, with literally unlimited funding, and we couldn't make it work on a Mac. This was 2017. I'm sure it's not as reliable today as it was then.
My goal on these forums is to help people have the best experience. Sometimes the best option is to just recommend people avoid techniques that probably aren't going to result in a good experience. It simply doesn't matter how well those techniques work on Windows or Linux. This is where we are. None of us can change Apple. We all know the trade-offs involved when switching, so we probably don't want to do that either. Yes, absolutely all these companies have the resource to fix these problem, but that simply isn't going to happen. We're on our own here.
