My problem is that unplugging an optical fibre SC type connector from the NIC's in various hardware required a power cycle to regain connectivity.

This spans Debian, RH9 and RedHat Enterprize. It's over dual processor and single i686's, Dell and other generic boxes. Various NIC's including Intel based and Allied Telesyn AT-2700FX. Both 1000BaseSX and 100BaseFX. Various switches of Cisco (3550) and some type of Dell.

I've tried the obvious ifup/ifdown/ifconfig and toying with the networking scripts. Restarting via this will not work after disconnection. Disconnection has to be > 5 seconds. I have no trouble when I test the WinTel boxes on site, they regain connectivity without interaction.

I've tried setting various duplexing and modes via mii-tool. The switches are normally set to 100BaseFX - full-duplex without autonegotiation for the 100Base connections.

I know that switches are set to shut down transmission to avoid eye-damage from the IR, but they usually restart, do NIC's have an equivalent setting to shutdown upon seeing daylight? Why do the WinTel's restart the card fine and the linux boxes require a power-cycle???

Thanks,
dion.

I have never seen this issue with Intel or Broadcom nics. I have tested on cisco, foundry, dell, extreme, etc, both with SC and LC, never seen an issue with link/re-link or even TTL (time to link). I have tested RH6-9, Fedora, Suse 7-9, Debian, and FreeBSD, in all sorts of servers and workstation OEMs/chipsets.

I hope you checked you cable and any duplex issues that can arise with SC. This sounds like an issue in the linux driver. Have you tried the latest? Or maybe a better question is have you tried an ealier version of the driver?

It almost sounds like we work in the same test lab.

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