Optical Fibre unplug requires power cycle
 

Hi all,

The basic 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. 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.