mii-tool

Forum: Networking
Topic: mii-tool
started by: catfish

Posted by catfish on June 21 2005,03:32

On one particular machine I need to run mii-tool to force the link speed (i.e., # mii-tool -F 10baset-hd). However, mii-tool reports "SIOCGMIIPHY on eth0 failed: Operation not supported. no MII interfaces found". Running this command on other OS (FC2, feather linux) works okay and I can proceed with "netcardconfig" to configure eth0.

"netcardconfig" seems to find eth0 and will attempt to DHCP (but it fails because there is no link).

Is there a potential trouble with mii-tool with DSL1.2.1 (running livecd and as root) or does anyone have any suggestions to troubleshoot?

Thanks,

Posted by Knuke on July 01 2005,17:09

I just tried it and it worked for me, but not at first. When I tried to do it as a user, I got the same message that you did. I have a hard drive install, if that makes a difference, and the syntax that I used was:

sudo mii-tool -F 10baseT-HD

Then as a normal user, I checked the setting with the command:

mii-tool

It showed that I was now running eth0 at 10base Half Duplex.

Hope this helps.
Knuke

Posted by catfish on July 04 2005,03:53

Thanks for the response. There must be a difference between the livecd and installed versions of mii-tool as that appears to be the only difference between our tests. I connected my machine to a different switch which doesn't require me to explicitly set the link parameters, and mii-tool still does not run (as root and even though eth0 is up and running).

Can you possibly test on your machine running from the livecd rather than the hd install?

Thanks,

Posted by Knuke on July 06 2005,20:11

Sorry about leaving you out in the cold for a while, but I forgot to follow up on this thread. You are right about the CD being different. I just tried it. I also ran into some other problems using mii-tool on a various different machines, and spent a BUNCH of hours researching the mii-tool.

What I found was that some machines do not like the --force command, so I started using the --advertise command, and things went much smoother. I also found that when using the CD, instead of using sudo to give the command, using Xterm as root worked. It is weird how different syntaxes can make a difference, but that's Linux. The exact command that I used with the CD was:

mii-tool --advertise=10baseT-HD

Again, I did this using Xterm as root.

Hope this helps!
Knuke

Posted by Knuke on July 06 2005,20:17

Short Addendum:

I did have one case where I eveidently played around with mii-tool a bit too much, and the NIC was just stuck on the wrong setting. I tried mii-tool -r command, but even that didn't work. I ended up shutting everything down, turning off the power supply, unplugging the network cable, and letting it rest for a minute. When I rebooted, the NIC came back up at the default 100Mbit setting. I used mii-tool again to throttle it back to 10Mb, and it worked the way it was supposed to work. Again, weird...

Knuke

Posted by catfish on July 11 2005,15:13

Thanks again for the response. I tried different mii-tool options and ways of running as root, but mii-tool still seems busted for me. I suppose the nic driver (ee100? - I can't exactly remember) in my case may be the problem and not have the proper support built in.