ifconfig/carrier

["Petr \[Dingo\] Dvorak" <dingo@texoma.net>]

Hey there,

I got up today morning just to find out that my network quit, the problem was
most likely network card going bad over night, it went away after i changed the
nic in my linux machine, but i would still like to get to the root of the
problem.

The card was 3c900/EtherLink XL PCI, i haven't had 3com quit on me yet before,
so that's why all this looks so weird to me.

First thing that i did i looked in ifconfig eth0, and this is what i got:

          RX packets:4937728 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:5143912 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:8672
          collisions:1 txqueuelen:100

i noticed that the carrier is unusually high, normally it stays at 0 so i
started looking for some kind of info on what it is, but i can't find anything
in the docs or on the net, would someone please enlighten me about this ?:)

                                                Dingo.


                                      ).|.(
                                    '.'___'.'
                                   ' '(>~<)' '
   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-ooO-=(_)=-Ooo-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    Petr [Dingo] Dvorak                                 dingo@pdragon.org
    Coder - Purple Dragon MUD                       pdragon.org port 3333
   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-[ 369D93 ]=-=-
      Debian version 2.2.18pre21, up 1 min, 2 users, load average: 0.09
   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-