NIC card problems

[Bill Tangren]

Will McDonald wrote:
> On 6/15/05, Bill Tangren <bjt at aa.usno.navy.mil> wrote:
> 
>>Will McDonald wrote:
>>
>>>On 6/15/05, Bill Tangren <bjt at aa.usno.navy.mil> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>This server has dual NIC cards (Intel Corp. 82541 GI/PI Gigabit Ethernet
>>>>Controller)
>>>>
>>>>I set both up, but they don't seem to be working properly. The minihub
>>>>they are plugged into indicated they are running at 10 mbps.
>>>
>>>
>>>Have you looked at the output of...
>>>
>>>ethtool eth0
>>>ethtool eth1
>>>mii-tool
>>>/sbin/ifconfig -a
>>>netstat -rn
>>>
>>>The cards could be negotiating the wrong link speed/duplex settings
>>>with the hub. If your mini hub only supports 10MBit/Half-duplex then
>>>try fixing the cards at that speed.
>>>
>>>Will.
>>>
>>
>>How do I fix the card speed?
> 
> 
> It depends which utility "works" on your system. 
> 
> On some older 10/100 MBit interfaced rackmount systems we manage
> ethtool doesn't report anything and mii-tool reports link status
> accurately.
> 
> On newer boxes with GBit interfaces mii-tool reports 100 MBit link
> speed for links which ethtool reports 1000 MBit and that is the actual
> speed of the interfaces.
> 
> Read the man page for ethtool and mii-tool or Google for how to
> actually "fix" interface speeds.
> 
> http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ethtool+mii-tool&meta=
> 
> If I remember rightly sometimes it can be done when loading the driver
> from /etc/modules.conf / /etc/conf.modules , other times you might
> have to do it somewhere like /etc/rc.d/rc.local using
> mii-tool/ethtool.
> 
> Will.
> 

This is very frustrating. mii-tool doesn't seem to work at all, as the 
google search seems to indicate. ethtool does seem to, but I can only 
get the card to work at 10Mbs Full duplex only. The module driving it is 
e1000, which I think is the correct driver. I am working on procuring a 
gigabit hub for it, but it is frustrating that I can't get these cards 
to go any faster than 10mbs. When I use ethtool to try to set them 
faster, the output of 'ethtool eth0' indicates that the software doesn't 
know what the speed duplex selections are. It gives errors, and little 
or no network traffic passes through the cards.

I am using a new mini hub, and it accepts both 10mbs and 100mbs. I have 
many other NICS plugged into it, and I have not had problems with it 
before. I am using the cabling that worked on older 10/100 NICS, so it 
must be CAT5.

Does anyone else have any ideas on what might be wrong?