Hi all,
Another FYI-mail (and just to verify that I'm not going insane here);
I recently purchased an ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI -board with a tri-core
Phenom. This is a small uATX-board with all the garnish integrated
motherboards are supposed to come with, and fairly well supported in
CentOS 5 and other modern distros. When I installed it (~2 months ago)
the NIC was not supported;
Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI
Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
...but Realtek provided a 2.6-kernel compatible r8168-driver;
r8168-8.006.00
When the CentOS 5.2 updates were published, I saw to my happiness that
the kernel-supplied r8169-driver now handled the NIC, and I had no
reason to rebuild the r8168-driver to support the new kernel.
Last time I rebooted, was July 2nd, to the 2.6.19-92.1.6.el5 kernel.
Since then, the kernel supplied r8169-driver worked like a charm. The
machine is a home file-server, serving files over NFS and SMB, and runs
my torrent downloads. It also pulls CentOS updates. I would have noticed
if it did not work.
Today, I got around to replacing a failed disk, and after rebooting I
had no network connectivity. The NIC displayed 'weird' symptoms; 10Mbps
link as shown by ethtool, 100Mbps link as shown by the link-indicator on
the switch, ifconfig showed no TX-packets, some RX-packets, /billions/
of dropped packets - increasing by millions every second. The kernel log
showed multiple 'Link down' entries.
After digging around a little, swapping switch-ports, yattayatta, I
unloaded the r8169-module (rmmod) and built and loaded the
Realtek-supplied r8168-module.
Link up, packtes going in and out, no dropped packets, GigE link, etc etc.
At this point I have no idea what actually happened. I'm thinking some
weird state on the PHY of the NIC (I've seen this on the Nvidia NICs)
that was not flushed due to a too short power-loss, or possibly that the
r8168-driver sets some PHY-state that was not lost at the kernel-update
that brought me the 'working' r8169-driver, or something similar.
I'm taking suggestions, tho.
Anyone else with this same board, CentOS 5.2 (x86_64) and using the
r8169-driver?
-S
--
Simen Thoresen, Dolphin ICS
Systems Administration and Wulfkit Support
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
