by Hi,
I have a Dell 8200 with Redhat 7.2 and a 2.4.7-10 kernel.
When I installed Linux, it thought that I had some kind of DEC network
card (at least that is what is said in "neat"). It used the tulip
driver which caused lots of RX and TX errors which made things very,
very slow. Here are the appropriate messages in /var/log/messages:
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: EEPROM default media type Autosense.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: Index #0 - Media MII (#11) described by a 21140 MII PHY (1) block.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: Index #1 - Media 10baseT(#0) described by a 21140 non-MII (0) block.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: Index #2 - Media 100baseTx(#3) described by a 21140 non-MII (0) block.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: Index #3 - Media 10baseT-FDX (#4) described by a 21140 non-MII (0) block.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: Index #4 - Media 100baseTx-FDX (#5) described by a 21140 non-MII (0) block.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: tulip0: MII transceiver #1 config 3100 status 7809 advertising 01e1.
Jan 21 15:45:29 localhost kernel: eth0: Davicom DM9102/DM9102A rev 49 at 0xd0968c00, 00:80:AD:C0:79:4D, IRQ 11
I'm certainly no expert, but it is interesting that the message even
says that the Davicom NIC was detected, but "neat" still reports some
DEC card and the tulip driver is used.
The fix was to make the system use the default dmfe driver instead of
the tulip driver. I edited /etc/modules.conf and changed:
alias eth0 tulip
to this:
alias eth0 dmfe
Then I did this:
ifdown eth0
rmmod tulip
insmod dmfe
ifup eth0
This solved my problem. The message in /var/log/messages at boot is
now:
Davicom DM9xxx net driver, version 1.36p1 (May 12, 2001)
I don't know why the dmfe driver wasn't used in the first place.
I also don't know who to tell to get this fixed or where to tell them.
If you know, can you tell me, and/or forward this email to them?
Thanks,
Jeff