[realtek] broken rtl8129 card?

[k.koukopoulos]

hello, i recently got hold of two identical cards, the vendor is LANTECH
and from what it says on the chip they are rtl8129 cards... 

while trying to get them to work on my redhat7.0 ( with 2.4.0 kernel )
i'm having the following problems:
$ modprobe rtl8129 
Jan 25 18:16:27 flesh kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:09.0
Jan 25 18:16:27 flesh kernel: rtl8129.c:v1.07 5/6/99 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/rtl8139.html
Jan 25 18:16:27 flesh kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8129 Fast Ethernet at 0xd800, IRQ 5, 00:00:ff:ff:09:4d.
Jan 25 18:16:27 flesh kernel: eth0: No MII transceivers found!  Assuming SYM transceiver.

the last line puzzled me but since i don't know much about ethernet cards i 
just continued setting up my lan.. on another pc i had a ne2k card that
is verified to work.. 
after setting things up the two boxes just won't ping eachother.. and in my logs:

Jan 25 14:57:25 flesh kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
Jan 25 14:57:25 flesh kernel: eth0: Transmit timeout, status 8d 0000 media eb.
Jan 25 14:57:25 flesh kernel: eth0: Tx queue start entry 4  dirty entry 0.

and on occasion i get:
Jan 25 14:57:33 flesh kernel: eth0: PCI Bus error 82000107.

also i tried the rtl8129-diag and mii-diag programs from the network drivers
web page but i can't decode much of what they say

both the cards behave the same way...  are they both broken? 



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