I just purchased another ThinkPad 600 and installed FreeBSD 6.0, expecting
it would go as smoothly as had my previous installations of FreeBSD on my
Web, database and nameservers, on the desktop machine on which I'm
experimenting with FreeBSD programming, and on the Dell Latitude where
FreeBSD is one of the 5 operating systems I have installed. The
installation did, indeed, seem to go smoothly. However, network
connectivity is an issue: Any time I try to do something that would
connect to the network (ntpd checking for time servers, sendmail starting
during the boot process, ftp, ping) I get dc0 watchdog timeout errors, and
most of the time nothing else. When I ping the network gateway, nothing
happens for several seconds, then ping reports response times of 8.77~,
7.77~, 6.77~, ..., 0.77~ seconds in a batch, then "goes to sleep" again,
repeating the sequence.
I made the mistake of trying to start Gnome with this problem
occurring. When, over an hour later, I was able to *finally* get to where
I could shut the desktop down gracefully, I resolved to not do *that*
exercise again!
This laptop came with two PCMCIA network cards - an IBM 10/100 EtherJet
CardBus 32-bit adapter, and a 3Com 3C574-TX 10/100Base-TX 16-bit
adapter. The EtherJet is the one I'm getting the dc0 watchdog timeout
errors with. When I try the 3Com, the boot process reports that it's
detected the card, but it doesn't make a network connection. I tried the
D-Link DFE-690TXD I use all the time in my w98 ThinkPad. FreeBSD
recognized the card, but did not attempt to configure it or make a network
connection. I also tried a D-Link DWL-G630 AirPlus G wireless card, which
FreeBSD didn't even know was there, as well as a D-Link DWL-AB650 AirPro
A/B wireless card. FreeBSD acknowledged the presence of the AB650, but
said there was no driver attached.
The EtherJet works correctly with both w2K on my Lattitude, and under w98
on my other ThinkPad (once I downloaded the drivers).
During the boot process, FreeBSD properly discovers the network card and
seems to be configuring it, including negotiating the IP address with the
DHCP server. Immediately after printing the MAC address, a bold text line
is written saying "dc0: link state changed to DOWN" and it writes the two
remaining lines ("media: Ethernet autoselect (none)" and "status: no
carrier"). There have been times when another bold line was printed later
saying "dc0: link state changed to UP", but the condition did not persist,
because I was getting dc0: watchdog timeout errors before the boot process
was done in those cases as well.
I tried using ifconfig to force the EtherJet into 10Mbps mode, as well as
full and half duplex, but none of those changes seem to have made any
difference. I also added "media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex" to the
ifconfig_dc0 line in rc.conf. This changed the reported "Ethernet
autoselect (none)" to "Ethernet 100baseTX " as expected, but
the "status: no carrier" keeps coming up.
When I boot FreeBSD with ACPI disabled (option 2), it reports several
unknown devices in the PCI PnP scan (not surprising) - and the EtherJet
works correctly. (Gnome comes up quickly, also.) However, when I boot
with ACPI enabled (option 1), the EtherJet cannot connect. I booted with
verbose logging, and noticed a couple of things: There are 4 devices, in
addition to the cardbus device, assigned to irq 9 (which is the irq being
used for the network connection, from what I can see), and FreeBSD says the
cardbus device is 16 bits, not 32 bits.
The man dc(4) page says the dc%d: watchdog timeout error can happen if the
device is unable to deliver interrupts for some reason, or if there is a
problem with the network connection. If there was a problem with the
network connection, I would expect to the lights on the switch (a D-Link
DSS-8+) to not be showing a solid network connetion, but this isn't happening.
When Gnome is starting, it also reports "No volume control elements and/or
devices found." I thought this might be related to whether ACPI was active
or not, but the same error message is displayed in both cases. I don't
know if this is a related issue or not.
uname -a reports
"FreeBSD London.FKEinternet.com 6.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Nov 3 09:36:13 UTC
2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386"
Please advise if any further information would be helpful in resolving this
problem - should I send the verbose dmesg output? dmesg with and without
ACPI, for comparison?
Thanks for any suggestions and support!
-- Fred Koschara
Ignorance can easily be cured by knowledge, stupidity is generally only
cured by death...
Truth and Falsehood were bathing. Falsehood came out of the water first and
dressed herself in Truth's clothes. Truth, unwilling to put on the garments
of Falsehood, went naked.
(Author Unknown)
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