Problems with an Ether Express Pro 100 chip

[Jeff Silverman]

Hi.  I have an old Pentium 120 MHz machine which I have pressed into 
service as a firewall.  It worked like a champ for months.  This 
afternoon, we moved it and the Ether Express Pro 100 chip on the 
motherboard stopped working.

I ran Donald Becker's eepro100 diagnostic program against it, and I 
found:

eepro100-diag.c:v2.11 8/27/2002 Donald Becker (becker at scyld.com)
 http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Index #1: Found a Intel i82557/8/9 EtherExpressPro100 adapter at 0x74e0.
i82557 chip registers at 0x74e0:
  ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff
  Interrupt sources are pending.
   The transmit unit state is 'Unknown'.
   The receive unit state is 'Broken-15'.
  This status is unusual for an activated interface.
 The Command register has an unprocessed command ffff(?!).
EEPROM size probe returned 0xfffffff, 8 bit address.
Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 EEPROM contents:
  Station address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF.
  Board assembly ffffff-255, Physical connectors present: RJ45 BNC AUI MII
  Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #-1.
    Secondary interface chip i82555, PHY -1.
   Sleep mode is enabled.  This is not recommended.
   Under high load the card may not respond to
   PCI requests, and thus cause a master abort.
   To clear sleep mode use the '-G 0 -w -w -f' options.

What does Broken-15 mean?

I tried clearing the sleep mode using the '-G 0 -w -w -f' options but to 
no avail.  Then, I used Donald Becker's mii-diag program with the -R 
switch and that did clear the sleep mode but the interface still doesn't 
work.


[root at rock root]# ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:06:29:62:8E:7B  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:6086 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:5735 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:387960 (378.8 Kb)
          Interrupt:15 Base address:0x6000 


Note the large number of overruns.  We checked the wire, and it's okay.  
We also tried plugging in a 3c905 card and that is working well.  But I'd 
really like to know what is wrong with this chip.


Does anybody have any advice?


Many thanks,


Jeff


-- 
Jeff Silverman, 
Senior Computing Specialist 3, Fire and Environmental Research Applications (FERA) team.
jeffs at duet.cfr.washington.edu   (206) 732-7815
http://duet.cfr.washington.edu