Failure to negotiate with 100Mb hub

[Larry Craton]

I've an Intel eepro 100B (chip 82557, board rev 8) under Linux 2.0.36
(RedHat 5.2) that refuses to finish negotiations with a Linksys fast 
ethernet 5-port hub (model FEHUB05W).  The eepro100 driver is v1.08 and
is being used as a module.  The eepro_diag and mii_diag programs seem 
to indicate that it fails during negotiation (negotiated status is 
incomplete and the "link partner capablility" byte is zero).  Visually
it looks like the boards sends a packet out every second or so,
presumably to re-negotiate.

This same board with the same hub negotiates -- and works -- correctly 
under Win95.

I tried using fixed attributes to force the board into the proper
state but this seemed to confuse the it even more.  The board sends
a constant stream of data to the hub and the diagnostics, while
showing the correct forced state, still shows that negotiation failed
to complete. While in this state I can turn network services off and 
rmmod the eepro100 driver and it makes no difference to the data stream 
being sent by the card.  In fact I can shutdown the system and the
datastream continues until reset or power off.

I've given up on the problem for now and went and bought a 10/100
switch instead and the card/driver combination works great with that.  
However, I thought that this data point might be useful in correcting 
this issue.

Larry Craton
Systems Software
Insight