Eth0 on 3c940 (P4P800) keeps locking.
 

Hello all.
Slightly different problem with P4P800/3COM 3c940 here.

I am happy for people having this board up and running;)

Since board updrade I have a problem running onboard 3COM 3c940 ( ASUS P4P800 ) with Zyxel Prestige 650ME DSL modem ( I was using this modem for about 8 month in my old setup with PCI LAN card problem free (at 100Mbs) ). First was WinXP installation. LAN was working on default settings just fine. After one month LAN refused to work. I made it working by changing 3c940 SPEED from AUTO to 10 Mbs. ( Degrade to 10Mbs for Gigabit chip!! :( )
Then I did a Linux installation ( MEPIS, Debian based ). 3Com driver 3c2000 was added to system like "insmod 3c2000.o Speed_A=10". It is succeffully activated at boot time and LED on the modem for 10Mbs is ON. The dmesg tells :
eth0:network connection up using port A
speed:10
autonegotiation:yes
duplex mode:full
flowctrl:none
scatter-gather:enable

It can stay like this for about 5-10 minutes and I am able to use Internet and all network services. Then it changes to 100Mbs ( LED on the modem changes from 10 to 100 ) and my eth0 is locked. ifconfig tells that it is UP but nothing is working.
The dmesg has now:
eth0:network connection up using port A
speed:100
autonegotiation:yes
duplex mode:full
flowctrl:none
scatter-gather:enable

To make it working again I have remove/insert driver or restart.

I think it changes to 100 because autonegotiation option is YES. Seems that driver 3c2000 doesn't have an option to change it to NO.

Any ideas on flow control?
Could it be hardware related and I should report the problem to the shop?
Thanks.

Hi,
seems you'd better use sk98 driver, it may be in your distro already. Search for "3c940" in this forum for instructions.

I've had extremely frustrating experience with 3c2000 from ASUS site (P4P800 MB) in my few Slacks. Spending hours on looking at Samba logs, changing oplocks, then browsing Ethereal outputs, changing speeds. I thought it was all Samba problems because the errors were not much evident, until I tried some Realtek card found in the wastebin...

Maybe I will try sk98 by myself... but to be on safe side I will first make my boss buy some another NIC.

Thank you vvp.
I agree that 3c2000 from ASUS doesn't work correctly. I tried to use sk98lin with option Speed_A=10 and it works. It doesn't reset to 100 over time.
Also I found info ( don't remember where) that 3c940 chip has a bug ( doesn't handle correctly short packets ). I expect that new drivers would possibly fix this. Still not clear to me how this chip is working with default settings for most of users.
All the best vvp.

I have this card in my ASUS A7V600 mobo, and the 3c2000 seems to work fine. I have it compiled as a module in 2.4.16. The only problem that I have with it is that is that the Speed is always set to 10, I can't seem to get it to change. The sk98lin driver worked GREAT for me in RH9, but since I switched to Debian I haven't been able to get it to work.