There isn't much info on the internet about it. Of the info that exists most is inconsistent, outdated, and/or wrong. The specific instructions need to depend on what's supported by the exact model number of your network card. You're dealing with hardware, so there's a chance of breaking things permanently. Close has zero value, the solution needs to be exactly right. Close but incorrect solutions are hard to debug.
Not sure any of it is going to brick hardware, but I haven't played with setting flags with ethtool. I've messed with Wake-on-Lan stuff in the past, as well as "prevent device from randomly waking from sleep" issues, too (on Windows, though).
I do have the advantage of a lot of past experience with Atmegas then RPis, so know a lot of the common sense hardware considerations... and a lot of troubleshooting. For me getting 90% correct with ChatGPT, and building up incrementally, has been an improvement on doing it all myself with google.
I might take an attempt at asking chatGPT how to do what the author did. Could be informative, even if just introspective realizations like, "oh, this is a question I asked in a good way due to my existing knowledge."
A key caveat in much of what I'm doing, is I'm implementing things I previously did for other projects in the past 15 years... so I'm using old technology, know the terminology, and can troubleshoot 90% correct stuff that chatGPT gives me.
I haven't done as much "I have no idea where to start" stuff.
This can be a bit of a problem since you can’t ask for what you don’t know, so starting broad by having it explain the general concepts to you, and then slowly getting more specific with direct pointed questions had the best outcomes.
Absolutely have felt the same often, in the past. Good news! There's ChatGPT now!
It's so much quicker than google for figuring out approaches; it's great for explaining concepts and "how to do x with tech". And it's great at writing the scripts for you too. I set up a prometheus/grafana dashboard with scripts for various temperatures from various APIs with its help.
Not trying to shill, but just sharing that this type of project is something that's a lot more feasible to implement in limited timeframes than it used to be. (and get the satisfaction of bringing the idea to fruition)
But I reckon I'll always want content like this that covers the journey of uncovering various edge-cases, too...