[eepro100] FYI Intel 82559 and Cisco Catalyst incompatibilities

[Farrell, Troy]

I'm posting this story hoping it will be a help to someone with similar
problems.

I've been seeing problems with the onboard adapter on the SuperMicro 370-DLR
MB in my new Penguin Computing Relion 220.  When I plug the Pro/100+ NIC
into our Cisco Catalyst 5500 with multiple WS-X5225R 24 port 10/100 cards,
the link light will come on for 30-90 seconds and go off for 5-30 seconds.
While the problem appears in both DOS and Linux, loading the Intel e100.o
driver and watching the message log reveals that the card is loosing the
link.  The driver reports something like "e100: eth0 Link is Down", followed
shortly by "e100: eth0 Link is Up 100FD". The system is running RedHat 7.1
and I've tried both the 2.4.2RH kernel and a new 2.4.7 kernel with the
eepro100 and Intel's e100 drivers.  I've also tried Mr. Becker's new driver
at ftp.scyld.com/pub/network/test/eepro100.c .  After reading the eepro100
list archives, I tried turning off the sleep bit, without any behavior
change.  To solve this problem, I've put a Linksys 10/100 switch between the
server and the Cisco Catalyst 5500 as the Intel NIC and the Catalyst refuse
to work together.

The problem is similar to that described by others in the past:
http://www.scyld.com/pipermail/eepro100/2000-March/000870.html
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/435/2000/10/0/4468572/
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.2/0904.html

Troy Farrell
Video Operations Technician III
Williams VYVX Services
Business Media Services
918.573.3029
918.573.1441 fax
mailto:troy.farrell@wcg.com