From owner-freebsd-net  Thu Feb  8  6:32:26 2001
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Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 15:32:03 EST
From: Andrea Venturoli <ml.ventu@flashnet.it>
Reply-To: Andrea Venturoli <ml.ventu@flashnet.it>
Subject: Meditation on rl driver
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Hello. 
I'd like to share some thought on what happened to me: I had an external ADSL modem from   
Alcatel connected (with a straight cable, since the device has a reversed ethernet port) to   
a RealTek card on a FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE box. 
I used the simple line in rc.conf: 
 
	ifconfig_rl1="inet 10.0.0.6 netmask 255.0.0.0" 
 
Everything would work for a while, but under heavy load the modem would hang so bad it had   
to be cycle-powered, because it wouldn't communicate anymore (the led on its ethernet port   
would turn off). 
After trying a lot of things and reading the modem manual over and over I saw that they   
required the ethernet card on the computer to be set to half-duplex. 
So I issued an ifconfig and saw that the card was set to media autoselect (NONE). 
I tried with 
 
	ifconfig rl1 inet 10.0.0.6 netmask 255.0.0.0 media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt half-duplex 
 
but it would not accept the last parameter. 
I ended up with the following in rc.conf: 
 
	ifconfig_rl1="inet 10.0.0.6 netmask 255.0.0.0 media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt   
-full-duplex" 
 
and now everything works fine. 
 
My wonderings are: 
_ "mediaopt full-duplex" does not work, while it's documented in the rl man page; isn't this   
a bug? 
_ autoselecting the media obviously does not work correctly, does it? 
_ if two devices are connected and one speaks half-duplex, the other full-duplex, shouldn't   
they fail to communicate at all? Is the hang-up after a while and under heavy load normal? 
_ has anything changed in the rl driver after 4.1-RELEASE? 
 
 
I also hope this might help other people... 
 
 Bye & Thanks 
	av. 





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