Internet not working without gpu installed?

Question

Today I removed my GPU out of an Linux (Ubuntu) machine, and after that the ethernet stopped working. Running 'service networking restart' threw an error message, and when I ran 'ifconfig' only the local loopback was visible. After this I re-installed my GPU and out of nowhere the internet started working again??

I would really like to have my machine be able to access the internet without having to install a GPU in it..

The GPU installed is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and I'm using the onboard ethernet connector. If you need any more specifications, please tell me and I'll dig a bit further.

The output of ip link WITH a GPU:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp2s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
link/ether d0:50:99:2f:ad:4d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

And without a GPU:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp1s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
link/ether d0:50:99:2f:ad:4d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Answer 1

Your networking devices are renamed to correspond with their location on the PCI bus. When you removed your GPU, your ethernet device changed from enp2s0 to enp1s0.

In order to reconnect, you have a few options:

• Create profiles for enp1s0 that match those of enp2s0
• Change the rules for naming devices to give this card a unique name, and edit your profiles accordingly
• See if swapping the positions of the network card and GPU make the network card always appear as enp1s0, and if so, edit the profiles to use that name