Jason Lim wrote:
Well, here is the stupid and interesting thing.
I've got more than 5 boxes here, all using the SAME realtek cards. Now if it was some negotiation error between card and switch, then it, in theory, should occur with all of them. Also, I mentioned that I had SWITCH cards around, so a functioning card from a "stable debian" box was put into the "unstable debian" box, and the same fallback to 10Mb occurred.
So I'm pretty sure that its a software issue. I was wondering if there could be anything... ANYTHING software related that could force the card into a fallback like that. Keep in mind that during bootup, and before Debian loads up the network code, it is still in 100Mb mode. It ISN'T a kernel problem either. The reason I say that is because if it was, then when kernel loads the RT8139 (yes, i finally checked ;-) ) the fallback should occur. However, it is STILL in 100Mb mode when it detects the Realtek cards (2 of them, and yes, i've tried booting with only 1, and switch those two around, put them in different PCI slots, etc.).
Could it, but some chance, maybe be the cards going into promiscuous mode causing the card to fall back to 100Mb? I've never seen it happen... but maybe?
Heres an interesting thing I tried. The cards came with a software disk (needed msdos to boot) that allowed me to switch between 10Mb, 100Mb, and Auto-neg. The cards are set by default to Auto-neg, as they should be. I FORCED it to 100Mb to see what would happen. Sure enough, I successfully got it to stay at 100Mb, but then the switch automatically disabled the port after around 5-10 minutes, and said it shut the port down due to "conflict". Thats it. Thats all it said (oh how helpful). This is a Cisco switch btw.
Please... ANY suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely, Jason Lim
Well,
I'm coming in late to the thread, but is it possible that somehow the startup script is different than the other boxen? Have you combed through the S10network script? how about copying one of the "like" boxes
script over and doing a diff on it? I dont' have any idea if this is
could help, but at this point, it can't hurt.
~duane
