mii-tool apparently lying about 3COM cards
 

Running RedHat EL AS 3.0

Previously on this flavor I've used Intel ethernet cards and was successfully able to view them and change settings with ethtool. However on 3COM 3c900 cards (one a 10 Base T card and the other a 10/100 card) I found mii-tool will report information about the cards. It is supposed to be used to change the cards (using -F media) option as well. However when I do the set although it doesn't give any errors I'm not sure it is doing the set.

Eventually on setting the Cisco switch port to auto/auto we discovered the 10/100 card IS at 100 Full Duplex which is what we want. We then configured the switch port to 100 Full to match.

However even though it is working I don't know WHY it is working since mii-tool still shows the card doing 10 Full instead of 100 Full.

Looking around the net I found comments suggesting one can set the options in /etc/modules.conf (I had tried this with the 10 Base T card) but as noted above it appears the issue isn't getting the card to work but getting it to show me what it is actually set to.

Can anyone offer any suggestions? Currently this box is in a test setup but I'm going to put it in as our DNS server and don't want it to wait until then to decide to change its setup for some unknown reason.

41 views and no responses? Either my question is extremely stupid or extremely intelligent because no one has taken a stab at it.

Funny you have the same problem as us. Long story short, the mii-tool support for the 3c90x series cards, in particular, the 905b's, stinks. mii-tool IS lying to you.

If you really want to see what you're syncing at, and do not have access to the router, run:
tethereal -Vf 'ether host 01:00:0c:cc:cc:cc'
It will sniff Cisco CDP packets out and let you know (along with your port #).

A show int fa0/x on the router should show you're at 100/full.

We were getting tons of crc errors, so I hardcoded the switch to 10 meg and we in the process of just throwing the 3com card in the trash. It's simpler than fighting this / loading 3com modules or whatever else we might have needed to do to fix it.

Ohh, and yes I believe you can specify these parameters at module loading time (instead of with mii-tool) for the 3coms with success. I'm not going to even bother though.

johndoe - thanks for the sanity check. I'd pretty much figured out it was lying but was hoping someone knew of another server based tool that would tell me the truth. As in your case we had to look at the router to see what it was actually doing.

By the way I DID try modifying /etc/module.conf at one point but had no way of telling whether it was successful.