I have several machines with Kingston 100TX 10/100 cards with a Digital
21140A chipset running on a P2 233 with 1.3.2.  The same machines have an
Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 on the motherboard.  After I've booted, if I
unplug the Intel ethernet cable and wait a few seconds and plug it back in,
it continues to work.  However, if I unplug the Digital ethernet cable for a
few seconds and plug it back in, the interface refuses to work until I do an
ifconfig de0 down; ifconfig de0 up.  At the bottom I've attached the probe
lines from my dmesg.

Unfortunately, these machines are set up to boot up and provide a NAT
service without human intervention, but if someone unplugs the cable for a
second the machine stops working for them.  Someone who's fooled with
ethernet drivers mentioned to me that he thought FreeBSD had a watchdog or
something in the digital driver to ensure that the link comes back up if the
link is restored.

I can always write a quick script that watches for the error message
(autosense failed: cable problem?) and tries to restore it every minute or
so until it comes back up, but it's very cheesy ;o)

Does the driver have an option or something so the machine can restore the
link?  If not, does -current still have this problem, or has it been fixed?

Thanks!   Mike.


Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: fxp0 at pci0 dev 3 function 0: Intel
EtherExpress Pro 10+/100B Ethernet
Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: fxp0: interrupting at irq 9
Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: fxp0: Ethernet address 00:e0:18:80:51:f1

Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: de0 at pci0 dev 18 function 0
Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: de0: interrupting at irq 12
Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: de0: 21140A [10-100Mb/s] pass 2.2
Dec 15 17:07:12 trantor /netbsd: de0: address 00:c0:f0:40:47:4b