[Beowulf] Mii interface not supported

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Zhang Hui wrote:

> I have written a nic monitoring function,using mii. But it does not
> work, even when i use mii-tool cmd in the shell it says "mii
> interface, operation not supported."

mii-tool or mii-diag require the presence of some MII-specific ioctls
in each network driver. Some drivers have these ioctls, some don't.
More recently (2.6 kernels), the MII-specific ioctls seemed to fall
out of fashion, being replaced by ethtool ones, which are obviously
used by the "ethtool" utility, which you can get at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/

> Later i find that some nics do not support mii.

Most NICs these days do support MII; what might be missing is Linux 
driver support for making MII data available to user tools.

> But it's not over, I still need the monitoring function, very
> urgently.

I'm sure that there are companies that can offer such services for a 
fee and can deliver whatever you need "very urgently"...

> So can anyone tell me whether there are some other better method to
> monitor the nic.

MII data is THE way of monitoring the link. If you are interested in 
other aspects than the link, then this is very much NIC and driver 
specific and should probably be asked on the Linux network developers 
mailing list (netdev at vger dot kernel dot org).

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu at IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De