Re: mii-diag strangeness

On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 19:50, Donald Becker wrote:
> 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!

I did some more checking on this.  It seems my earlier assumptions were
incorrect.  Mii-diag fails on both the Network Engines and the IBMs, but
only with the latest version, v2.02 is fine:
 
0 a1-dca-qwest darkness /home/darkness > sudo /usr/local/bin/mii-diag -V
mii-diag.c:v2.03 11/5/2001 Donald Becker ([email protected])
 http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Using the default interface 'eth0'.
Basic registers of MII PHY #0:  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000.
 Basic mode control register 0x0000: Auto-negotiation disabled, with
 Speed fixed at 10 mbps, half-duplex.
 Basic mode status register 0x0000 ... 0000.
   Link status: not established.
 Link partner information is not exchanged when in fixed speed mode.
   End of basic transceiver information.

0 a1-dca-qwest darkness /home/darkness > sudo /root/mii-diag -V
mii-diag.c:v2.02 5/21/2001 Donald Becker ([email protected])
 http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Using the default interface 'eth0'.
Basic registers of MII PHY #1:  3000 782d 02a8 0154 05e1 41e1 0001 0000.
 The autonegotiated capability is 01e0.
The autonegotiated media type is 100baseTx-FD.
 Basic mode control register 0x3000: Auto-negotiation enabled.
 You have link beat, and everything is working OK.
 Your link partner advertised 41e1: 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx 10baseT-FD
10baseT.
   End of basic transceiver information.

-- 
 Joe Rouvier
 Systems Administrator
 Netli.com
 (650)812-0565 x131