Re: mii-diag strangeness

On 8 May 2002, Joe Rouvier wrote:

> I'm having a strange problem with mii-diag on IBM Netfinity 4000R's.  It
> seems that mii-diag works fine as a non-root user, but reads all nulls
> when run as root, and fails to force an interface to a specific mode,
> etc.  This problem is reproducable on different boxes.  Mii-diag
> compiled with and without libmii.c return the same result.

Hmmm, this is curious.
My drivers only check for 'root' with MII writes, not reads.
What driver version are you using?

> One item of note.  The Netfinity 4000R uses almost exactly the same
> motherboard as the Network Engines WebEngine, but with a different
> BIOS.  The problem does not happen on WebEngine boxes.

That's very strange!

> eepro-diag output:
...
> Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 EEPROM contents:
>   Station address 00:06:29:DE:D4:79.
>   Board assembly 001024-010, Physical connectors present: RJ45
>   Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
>    Sleep mode is enabled.  This is not recommended.
>    Under high load the card may not respond to
>    PCI requests, and thus cause a master abort.
>    To clear sleep mode use the '-G 0 -w -w -f' options.

You should pay attention to this.

-- 
Donald Becker				[email protected]
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993