[sclug] RTL8201 (Sis961) problem

[Pieter Claassen]

1. The card is an onboard  SiS961 that looks like or uses (I don't
understand if it is a SiS chip or RTL) RTL8201.
2. There is nothing in the logfiles to suggest anything really suspicious.
3. No switch, only the Intel 10Mbs hub. As a matter of fact, I tried
different cables, different machines, different ports. I even connected a
cross over cable to my laptop and the link layer LED was dead and machines
could not see each other. Previously, the machine could sometimes see the
network, but with a crossover it is totally dead!

This looked like a hardware failure and I was ready to return the board, but
thought that I would install a copy of M$ XP and lo and behold, the card is
working fine. So I reinstalled Debian 3.0 from scratch and the card is fine.

Well, kind of. When I plug the network cable out and back, the card suddenly
gets

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
eth0: Transmit timeout, status 00000000 00000251



Here are some quick questions and comments:
1. Be careful with this Realtek8201 because as you can see, it is not that
stable. Maybe my driver is not ok!
2. What is the realtek driver called and how do I check the version just in
case there is a new driver out there that might solve the problem. There is
very little info on the RT8201 on the web (who wrote the driver etc.)

Thanks for the help and Donald Beckers diagnostics site. I will go and check
it out.

Cheers,
Pieter


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan H N Chin" <jc254 at newton.cam.ac.uk>
To: <sclug at sclug.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: [sclug] RTL8201 (Sis961) problem


> Pieter Claassen <pieter at openauth.co.uk> wrote:
> > 2. It can make http connections to any machine on the local subnet, but
=
> > it  times out on large volumes of data.
> > 3. Can sometimes make connections within the SP network, but mostly =
> > times out.
> > 4. I get collisions on the ifconfig (low amount), but sometimes I get =
> > drops and sometimes the syslog tells me: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit
=
> > time out
> > 6. It does get a DHCP address (but sometimes not)
>
> Are you connected to a switch somewhere?
> On Cisco, for example, portfast settings can affect machines
> ability to talk on the network (modern pcs boot so fast that the
> spanning tree checks haven't completed before the pc tries to use
> the network). See, for example:
>
>     http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/12.html
>
>
> > I have no idea what is going on! Any suggestion on how to start to =
> > address the problem?
>
> Have you checked your logs thoroughly?
> Is there anything other than the watchdog message?
>
> Have you checked that your cables and connections are okay?
> What happens if you swap machines around?
>
> What network card are you using?
> For example, eepro100 used to have problems under load.
> Or, if you have a 3com vortex card, Documentation/networking/vortex.txt
> in the kernel source tree has debugging suggestions.
> Donald Becker has pages about ethernet drivers and diagnostic tools at:
>
>     http://www.scyld.com/network/index.html
>     http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
>
> Some general advise for debugging networking problems is available at:
>
>
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa97/full_papers/17
.urner/17_html/main.html
>
> Plug keywords and the various messages you have seen into google and
> see what it spits out.
>
>
> -jonathan
>
> --
> Jonathan H N Chin, 1 dan | deputy computer | Newton Institute, Cambridge,
UK
> <jc254 at newton.cam.ac.uk> | systems mangler | tel/fax: +44 1223
335986/330508
>
>                 "respondeo etsi mutabor" --Rosenstock-Huessy
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