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Date:      Tue, 25 Mar 2003 15:01:13 +0100
From:      Olivier Dony <olivier@blacktrap.net>
To:        FreeBSD-questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   rl(4): autoselect/manual media == no carrier at boot time?
Message-ID:  <20030325140113.GA7586@vega.blacktrap.net>

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Hello, that's me again :)

rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xec00-0xecff mem 0xdfffff00-0xdfffffff irq 10 at device 5.0 on pci0
rl0: Realtek 8139B detected. Warning, this may be unstable in autoselect mode
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is my detected NIC. It has always been detecting 100baseTX half-duplex,
when I am actually plugged into a cool 100Mbps switch. So after a couple of
tests, I decided that full-duplex was going fine and appended "media 100baseTX
mediaopt full-duplex" to the ifconfig_rl0 line in my rc.conf, just in case.
The card was actually working fine in this mode. Also given that rl(4) isn't
so happy with autoselect mode if the proper PHY chip is not present (or
something), I thought this would be a good thing.

Now it happened that the server rebooted after a kernel panic (this is 5.0, I
will be taking *this* subject to -current), but the problem here is that rl(4)
detected no carrier :
kernel: rl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
kernel: inet 666.666.222.35 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 666.666.222.255
kernel: ether 00:50:fc:97:41:b4 
kernel: media: Ethernet 100baseTX <full-duplex>
kernel: status: no carrier 

My ISP says that they have not touched the UTP cable. After they rebooted the
server again while trying to find why it was down, the same "no carrier"
appears in the dmesg, so after a normal boot too. They claim that after this
second reboot they unplugged and then plugged back the UTP connection and the
NIC's led came to life and the network was up again (and still is, 
full-duplex).

My question is, is it possible that setting the media to 100baseTX
<full-duplex> could cause problems for carrier detection at boot time? Or is
my ISP lying and they unplugged the network just right during the kernel panic
and only plugged it back after a while? This doesn't sound likely...
I do not feel like rebooting again right now just to see if using autoselect
works, I'd rather not have to call them today to fix it once more ;-)

Thanks in advance

Olivier, always learning more thanks to you!

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