Denis Heidtmann wrote:
> Thanks for all the information.  You have saved me from a fruitless
> bunch of tests.  I do not claim to have gotten my head around all the
> stuff in those links, but I have the impression that if the NIC is
> misbehaving during the autonegotiation process I have no reasonable
> way to find that out.
>
> The connection has not had a failure for some days now (many shutdowns
> and reboots, but no interruption of power to the modem or the
> computer), even though renegotiation is likely happening often.  Also,
> when failure occurs the only thing which appears to fix it is to shut
> down and power down the computer.  I conclude from this that most
> likely the NIC occasionally gets into a bad state during power-up.
>
> Do you see this as an accurate assessment?
I think we did veer a bit of course. But the auto-net theory & testing 
was to figure out if it's a physical problem with the hw nic or if it's 
a software (driver, tcp/ip stack, OS) level issue.

We're still left w. the fact that thus far the only diff you've noticed 
between a working and non-working network connection is the presence or 
non-presence of the "1000baseT" advertised mode.

So, the question still remains why does everything appear to work: link 
lights, ip addr, mac addr, except you can't ping the modem/router and 
the "100baseT" is missing from the advertised mode in ethtool?

One of the things the 'MII-Tool' shows which 'ethtool' doesn't is "link 
partner" information

r...@mc-goose:~# mii-tool -v eth0
link partner: 1000baseT-HD 1000baseT-FD 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 
10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD flow-control

This could be useful info.

The fact that thus far the problem only happens or is resolved upon 
boot/power hints strongly at either intermittent physical  or driver 
problem that we may never determine.

We've pretty well flogged this horse. If this were my setup, and if the 
modem/router only supported 10/100, I would get an Intel or 3com 10/100 
NIC and disable the on-board. I think at that point chances would be 
greatly in your favor that you'd never see this problem again...

_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

Reply via email to