KNE100TX furious activity

Ed Snible esnible@goodnet.com
Sun Nov 21 15:10:43 1999


I have two Kingston KNE100TX tulip cards (which work under Win98.)  Under
Linux, the 'activity' light on both the cards and the hubs flash furiously,
and the cards can't ping each other.

Using a SOHOware 10Mbps hub the 'partition' light comes up (indicating a port
has been found to be faulty and has been isolated.)  Both the SOHOware hub and
a D-Link DSS-5+ 10/100 "switch" I'm using for test begin flashing their
activity lights starting when I issue "ifconfig eth0 up".

I'm using Redhat 6.0 (2.2.5-15, unmodified, with tulip.c v0.89H) on an Asus
P2B motherboard.  Any advice greatly appreciated -- this is my home LAN, and
my first Linux ethernet (I work for IBM where life is token ring).  The other
machine is an Asus socket 7 MB with AMD CPU, Redhat 6.1, tulip 0.89 with
identical KNE100TX and exhibits identical symptoms.

I'm attaching the output of ifconfig and tulip-diag.  Any advice greatly
appreciated.  I've tried using the "options tulip options=" settings to force
the cards into 10Mbps mode and they exhibit the same flashing 'activity' but
at 10Mbps.  I haven't tried the 0.91 driver yet (I don't have Linux source
installed.)

# /sbin/ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:3B:66:AE  
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:10 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:6 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:18
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb800 

# ./tulip-diag -m
tulip-diag.c:v1.19 10/2/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Index #1: Found a Digital DS21143 Tulip adapter at 0xb800.
 Port selection is 100mbps-SYM/PCS 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit threshold is 128.
  The NWay status register is 000020c6.
 MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x782d.
 MII PHY #1 transceiver registers:
   1100 782d 0016 f831 01e1 41e1 ffff ffff
   ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
   0022 ff00 0870 fff0 0008 ffff ffff ffff
   ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff.
  Internal autonegotiation state is 'Ability detect'.
 
Ed Snible
esnible@goodnet.com