[tech] Broken ethernet on pinball

Felix von Perger frekk at ucc.asn.au
Thu Aug 22 19:32:31 AWST 2019


Hi all,

An unknown/undiagnosed thing happened to Pinball between 17:30 and 18:30 
today, resulting in the onboard ethernet becoming inoperable.

Intriguingly, the link status lights on the port flashes as expected, 
and the OS recognises the link when the cable is connected. The cable 
and wall port worked fine when tested with my laptop. When plugged in, 
however, pinball fails to acquire an address by DHCP, ARP does not seem 
to work at all, and the switch port (kerosene, interface GigabitEthernet 
3/22) doesn't list any MAC addresses in its forwarding table:

> kerosene#show mac address-table interface Gi3/22
> Multicast Entries
>  vlan     mac address     type    ports
> ---------+---------------+-------+--------------------------------------------
>    3      ffff.ffff.ffff   system Gi2/1,Gi2/11,Gi2/13,Gi2/19,Gi2/32,Gi2/33
> Gi2/48,Gi3/2,Gi3/4,Gi3/15,Gi3/17,Gi3/21
> Gi3/22,Gi3/25,Gi3/29,Gi3/31,Gi3/33,Gi3/34
>                                   Te1/1
>
No suspicious kernel messages in pinball's /var/log/syslog, except for a 
link-down message at 18:10. It's using the r8169 driver (which I've 
personally had issues with in the past, which I had worked around by 
using the r8168 driver instead). The ethernet hardware is listed as 
"Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit 
Ethernet Controller (rev 15)" by `lspci`.

I'm going to leave it powered off this evening and it might just work 
again tomorrow. If not, it would probably be worth investigating 
alternative drivers and/or ethernet cards.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Felix [FVP]



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