Comment 69 for bug 1785171

I caveat this comment with an apology for not having any logs to share, but anecdotally, I was having this problem on a Thinkpad T460s, which has an i219-LM nic, running Ubuntu desktop 20.04 LTS. Wired network would disconnect on average every 20 minutes, sporadically, without warning. Made Zoom conferences very annoying, as I would drop out without warning, then have to re-login, reconnect to the conference room, and then pick up where we left off. Internet searches or clicking links would randomly turn up a "not connected" error page. There was no particular pattern I could ascertain as to when/why it would happen, it just did.

Then I upgraded to a Dell Precision 7730 laptop, which unfortunately has the same i219-LM nic. I installed my NVMe ssd from the Thinkpad T460s, so unsurprisingly, I had the same wireless network dropping issues. Unrelated, I installed .list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d for 20.10 and 20.10-proposed so I could install more current qemu-kvm packages, and came across the linux-image-5.6-1021-oem package. The e1000e.ko contained within is is 3.2.6-k, which is a little outdated, but it doesn't drop connection so that doesn't particularly matter - it's infinitely less obnoxious to run.

The list file for the repo is: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ groovy-proposed restricted main multiverse universe and I run it pinned as priority 300 to avoid it installing anything that might break my system:

$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/proposed-updates
# Configure apt to allow selective installs of packages from proposed
Package: *
Pin: release a=groovy-proposed
Pin-Priority: 300

I also have a feeling the e1000e-dkms package would be a good fix, which might be attractive to someone wanting a newer version of the ko, but, as I have no interest in making my kernel installations take longer than they already do, I have not tried it.