[tulip] NetGear FA310TX detected on bootup but not usable

[Alex Southgate]

I installed a FA310TX Rev.2 in an old Zeos Pantera P60 box runing RH6.1 with
kernel 2.2.14 I believe.  

Upon installation the card was detected immediately:

dmesg | grep eth0

eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xc383b000, 00:A0:CC:66:4E:84, IRQ 10.
eth0:  MII transceiver #1 config 3000 status 782d advertising 01e1.

However it doesn't seem to be functioning correctly in our simple local
network.. i.e. pings to and from the box don't work and tcpdump produces no
output during these ping sessions.

ifconfig eth0 shows me that I'm getting lots of mean little transmit errors:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:A0:CC:66:4E:84  
          inet addr:192.168.0.4  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:180 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb000 

Running ./tulip-diag -m -m I get some strange Rx and Tx process states,
namely "Reading a Rx/Tx descriptor" respectively.  This seems odd to me.  Is
this indicative of a particular problem? 

tulip-diag.c:v2.03 7/31/2000 Donald Becker (becker@scyld.com)
 http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Index #1: Found a Lite-On 82c168 PNIC adapter at 0x3000.
 Port selection is MII, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Reading a Rx descriptor'.
  The Tx process state is 'Reading a Tx descriptor'.
  The transmit threshold is 72.
 MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x782d.
 MII PHY #1 transceiver registers:
   3000 782d 0040 6212 01e1 40a1 0003 0000
   0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
   5000 030c 0004 0000 0000 03f9 0800 0000
   003e 833e 0f00 ff00 002e 4000 20a0 000b.

Here's the output of mii-diag if it's any help:

./mii-diag eth0
Setting the media capability advertisement register of PHY #1 to 0x000f.
Basic registers of MII PHY #1:  1000 782d 0040 6212 0001 40a1 0003 0000.
 Basic mode control register 0x1000: Auto-negotiation enabled.
 You have link beat, and everything is working OK.
 Your link partner advertised 40a1: 100baseTx 10baseT.

That looks good to me... deceivingly good.

What am I missing here?

Thanks for any help,
Alex


Alex Southgate | Learning In Progress | 212.905.4920