Thank you Mr Becker. That is exactly the information I was looking for . Its very odd but this error behavior is showing up on a rtl8139 card linked into a ciso switch. The switch itself reports frame checksum errors from the port into which the nic is plugged. The switch port is forced at 100 Full , the Realtec tries to Autonegotiate. I am going to try forcing the media type to see what happens. by the way .. i'd like to report some odd behavior from a rtl8139 card i have .. I am useing the rtl8139-diag program from your site to adjust the media type . It seems that if i force the media type i have to discontinue power to the nic card before the new register entry takes effect ... No biggie .. but its anoying that i actually have to turn the boxes power off before the new setting takes effect. (sometimes this occurs natuarlly after a reboot command .. ie i see the light onb the hub go out for a second and then come back. then i know it took without me having to turn the power off) thanks again Madhav Donald Becker wrote: > > On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Madhav Diwan wrote: > > > Hey .. can someone clarify this: > > > > If i send a ping packet or any other packet out to a network where my > > interface is UP but not plugged into anything with a cable, should i > > get an error on the interface when i look at an ifconfig command ? > > Perhaps, but not certainly. > It depends on the media type and transceiver. > With many types of fiber transceivers, no. > With 10base2 transceivers, always. > Twisted pair transceivers often have a non-standard mode to ignore > link beat, but will usually report transmit attempts with no link > beat. In some cases this will not be reported immediately. > > > How else can i get recieve and trasmit errors? > > Many, many ways. Check out a good Ethernet "MIB". > Everyone knows about Rx CRC and length (runt and oversize) errors. > Most know about Tx out-of-window collisions and 16-collision. > Some of the less obvious error types are heartbeat, dribble bits, and > framing/symbol errors. Rx and Tx jabber detection, and IFG > over-shrinkage... > > Other error information that doesn't fit naturally into counters: > Some 10base2 transceivers can estimate the distance to a short or open > Some 100baseTx transceivers can estimate the distance to the link > partner or a bad cable kink. > > Other types of failures are internal to the NIC or driver, such dropped, > FIFO and ring errors are also counted. > > Donald Becker becker@scyld.com > Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com > 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters > Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993 - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
