Happy Meal Ethernet - hme on Ultra1 not reliable
I have an Ultra1 running Debian 3 and it has gone through
2.4.18 up to 2.4.20 kernels trying to resolve a problem with the
ethernet going down on Sun hme.
In the 2.4.18 kernel I would get an error of :
Happy Status 03030000 TX[000003ff:000000301]
That went away with 2.4.19 but it would still hang the ethernet
periodically. I tried debian stock and my own compiled kernel
with .20 and no better. I don't see any errors on the console, nothing
showing eth0 activity or errors in /var/log/messages at
the time it drops the connection. I have to reboot to get
it back up again (currently not a module).
I tried ethtool to set the duplex to half and the speed to 10
but that has only partially helped. I still have to reboot every
second day to get connected again.
The failure seems to sync with events involving a burst of data,
such as nmap probing it from another machine, or scrolling
text very rapidly over an ssh session.
Looking at the comments in sunhme.c of the kernel code, it looks
like the driver programmer had a frustrating experience.
If HME ethernet isn't reliable, what SBUS alternatives are there which will
work well? I need an ethernet card for which there will be a
unique MAC address or I can set the address, to work with the DHCP
server at my work.
--Donald Teed
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