The other day, I was hit by an Apple bug that rendered my ethernet connection to the internet inoperative. I didn't know that Apple was at fault, assuming a problem with my ISP (Time Warner Cable). A phone call to TWC resulted in an offer to replace the modem (which I did, since the TWC office is less than 5 minutes from my house) but that didn't solve it. A followup call to TWC elicited the statement that many Mac users were reporting the same issue. As it turns out, I restored the connection by cloning back from a clone that I had made two days before (after manually updating the few files that had changed since then).
Today, I read
Apple breaks Mac Ethernet port with security update, issues fix and immediately followed the instructions for installing the updated kernel extension.
I suppose that this was good, in a way, because TWC swapped a more advanced modem for the older one, and the new one is compatible with TWC's upcoming improvements to service.
