No networking on Ubuntu w/ 1.2A device

VisionFive 2 （English Forum)
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After a bout with a bad power supply, I’m late to the party of trying to bring my earlybird board online with the new Ubuntu image, having largely sat out the -55 and -69 engineering image phase on this board. I’ve spun through the flashing process twice and can’t really find any steps in that I could have messed up. Part of my problem might be inexperience with the latest Ubuntu on SBC’s (team DietPi, though i wanted to go more developer-oriented on this one), though I’m an experienced UNIX/Linux guy.

I have a cable in the outermost port. I’m suspicious that I have an orange LED on the interface blinking traffic, but no green one. In fact, I see mention of a green LED on the board, but see only the red one near the USB-C power source.

dmesg doesn’t show any signs of dhcp getting a grant. ‘ip address’ shows:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: end0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether XX:39 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 XX39/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: end1: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether XX:3a brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

I did see the print at the bottom of RISC-V/StarFive VisionFive 2 - Ubuntu Wiki mentioning the 1.2A boards, confirmed that applies to me, applied those steps, reflashed and rebooted. No difference. That SEEMS to be the right problem area because ‘lsusb’ also doesn’t show the presence of the WiFi Dongle that I also have plugged in. (Its presence or absence changes nothing.)

I’m struggling with the absence of ifconfig, traceroute, route, and friends as it seems you need a network connection to install the packages containing those now, but I’m also pretty sure that’s a lower level collection of tools than I should be needing to bring up a plain ole DHCP connection on a board that physically has fixed, known ethernet hardware.

I don’t see a dhcp process in the process table, but I don’t know if that’s expected in modern systems where DHCP is so common; it may have been subsumed into another process by now. ‘dmesg’ shows so so much stuff, but I see no evidence of any attempt to set an IP address.

I’m using only the serial connection for now as I didn’t have a lot of faith that graphical console would be something supported on this board from a SERVER ISL image. It’s kind of a deadlock to not have graphical admin tools and to not have networking to install networking, but it sure seems like this should be pretty much self-configuring for this kind of default configuration.

Can any of you please help identify the step that I’ve missed or offer additional troubleshooting things to poke?

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