Re: ethernet inteface: lost connection

From: Haines Brown (brownh_at_hartford-hwp.com)
Date: 08/24/05 

Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 22:13:30 GMT

Grant, thank you for the information, but it leaves me with some
questions - to be honest, a lot of questions (sorry about that).

As for the context, I'm running on an ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard,
chipset nVidia, with a AMD64 CPU, and onboard NIC is nForce. The
distribution is Debian sarge, and the kernel is 2.6.8-2-686.

Let me ask first about the result of lspci:

  0000:00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005c
  0000:00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0057
  0000:00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005d
  [and three more more of the same device 005d lines]

I presume this is the MB chipset speaking: Everything seems unknown to
it. What is the implication of this, since I believe my hardware has
drivers. While I'm having a problem with the onboard NIC, it's driver
(forcedeth) apparently loads (see below).

  0000:05:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro
        100] (rev 04)

This is my Intel NIC card. It is working. I assume I should have a
similar statement for the onboard nForce NIC. Nothing is attached to
it; does that make a difference?

Why do you assume I have 2 "onboard" NICs? I have one onboard and one
off board card. However, is the presence of onboard firewire
considered an onboard NIC as well?

> >eth2: unknown hardware address type 24
> >eth1: unknown hardware address type 24
>
> The two onboard NICs are now eth1 + eth2, if you happy with plugin
> NIC disable them in the startup / configure / whatever your poison
> :)

When you say "plugin", do you mean PnP? If so, I avoid it. Are you
suggesting that if PnP was working for me satisfactorily, I could
have my system not load the drivers explicitly? As for preventing the
system from doing that, I saw nothing in /etc/init.d/ etc. that looked
like a call to initialize the NICs. Would you mind elaborating your
point?

> >The DHCPDISCOVER seem to work, but what are the "unknown hardware
> >address" statement?
>
> Something doesn't know how to talk to you new hardware, see what it
> is and disable it until you get driver / whatever.

I can't think of what might be wanting to talk to my hardware that
does not have a driver loaded. How would I find out what is trying to
talk to the onboard NIC?

Here are some results of # dhclient:

  sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
  eth2: unknown hardware address type 24
  eth1: unknown hardware address type 24
  sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
  eth2: unknown hardware address type 24
  eth1: unknown hardware address type 24
  Listening on LPF/sit0/
  Sending on LPF/sit0/
  Listening on LPF/eth3/00:13:d4:2e:30:d6
  Sending on LPF/eth3/00:13:d4:2e:30:d6
  Listening on LPF/eth2/
  Sending on LPF/eth2/
  Listening on LPF/eth1/
  Sending on LPF/eth1/
  Listening on LPF/lo/
  Sending on LPF/lo/
  Listening on LPF/eth0/00:a0:c9:b4:d5:a8
  Sending on LPF/eth0/00:a0:c9:b4:d5:a8
  Sending on Socket/fallback
  DHCPDISCOVER on sit0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
  DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
  DHCPREQUEST on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
  DHCPACK from 192.168.111.1
  bound to 192.168.111.2 -- renewal in 37863 seconds.

An OT question here. I assigned my host with the address
192.168.1.1. It looks into a firewall/router (the "LPF" here?) that I
believe is reserving the address 192.168.111.1 for the trusted
network. Is it reassigning my machine's address to 192.168.111.2?

Also, I set up my network for eth0. It seems that there is a listen on
LPF eth1 and eth2 (is the firewall router giving itself the interface
eth0?), and there's success with eth0 (the firewall?). So the
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 means that my eth0 interface is working, and is
bound to 192.168.111.2. Does that mean if I were to ssh in from the
outside, I'd use that address rather than 192.168.1.1?

My /var/log/boot log is similar, but has:

  Discovering hardware: aic79xx snd-emu10k1 emu10k1-gp e100 ohci1394
  Loading e100:
  ...
  Starting hotplug subsystem:
    pci
      forcedeth: loaded successfully
      e100: already loaded

It seems that my Intel NIC (e100 driver) gets loaded first, and the
onboard nForce NIC (foredeath driver), requires hotplug.

My dmesg has some other information that puzzles me.

  $ dmesg | more
  ...
  e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.0.18
  forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.29.
  eth3: forcedeth.c: subsystem: 01043:8141 bound to 0000:00:0a.0
  e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex
  eth0: no IPv6 routers present
  e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex
  eth0: no IPv6 routers present
  eth3: no link during initialization.
  eth3: no IPv6 routers present

It seems my onboard NIC is eth3 (with the firewall being eth0 and my
Intel e100 NIC eth1, and perhaps firewire eth2). The eth3 has "no link
during initialization." Is that simply because nothing is connected to
it?

My original question was whether my motherboard NIC was broken. I
suspect I just suffered from misconfiguration initially. But now that
I've troubled to insert a NIC card to get communications going, I'm
probably best off keeping it in. For normal use (smtp, http, ftp, and
undemanding ssh), I suppose its age won't show. Down the road I'll
want to import X to a remote machine, and the NIC's speed (100 mbps)
may slow things down - don't know. 

-- 
 
       Haines Brown
       KB1GRM

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