[eepro100] eepro100 and Dell PowerEdge 1550

[Oliver George]

(This is a quick note to help the next poor sole who suffers my trials... )

I have a new Dell PowerEdge 1550, a 1U 1GHz rackmount server, the only 
troubles i had related to the network card.

I did a debian stable install on it from CD, my only source of troubles 
related to the network card.  The Dells have an Intel etherexpress 
i82557 chip.  My problem was that although insmod detected and seemingly 
configured everything fine the actual physical link LED didn't ever go 
on.  For a while I got it going by running the hardware diagnostics 
utilities which objviously tweaked with the network device configuration 
but after a cold boot those settings were lost.

After lots of grief I discovered that my only problem was the default 
autonegotiation mode wasn't playing nice, forcing it to 100baseTX fixed 
all my problems.

my new /etc/modules looks like this....... "eepro100 options=0x30"

for reference the references and utils (especially mii-diag who was my 
saviour in this easy trouble0
  http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
  http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.html

The resources were a life saver, thanks very much everyone.

cheers, Oliver.