[eepro100] Twin laptops - one good NIC configuration - one bad

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, John Sved wrote:

> I have two Dell Inspiron 4000 connected to a home/office network.
> Several other PCs work OK with apparent 100/half.
...
> Dell no. 1 works very poorly with windoze and linux.  The Longshine
> LCS-883R-SW800M= switching Hub indicates that the Dell no. 1 is in full
> duplex but the link/Act LED is continuously flashing at about 1 Hz.
..
> This appears to be a problem with auto negotiation.  I suspect that the
> Dell no. 1 windoze driver for the NIC has changed a register and it has
> not or cannot be changed by the eepro100.  I can get it to change to
> 100/half in windoze but then the connection is poor.

Something is broken.  There should be no perceivable performance
difference between half and full duplex.

> I have tried various options 0x10, 0x20, 0x100 and 0x200   and  ether=0,
> 0, 0x200 eth0   etc. via the SuSE 8.0 YAST network card configuration
> tool.

Without knowing the SuSE configuration and driver version, it's difficult to
advise you which options might be valid.

> The use of a different hub (Fibreline) "cures" the problem.  But there
> are fewer indicator lamps to know the mode.

That points to a hardware problem, or perhaps marginal cables.

> Note: I have downloaded eepro100-diag, compiled it with gcc and tried to
> start it.  Nothing happens.

What do you mean by "nothing happens"?  Is there output?

Try running 'mii-diag --watch'.


-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
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