The collected works of Estuans

Hi all,

I've Just managed to acquire an O2 as a companion to my Octane.
However, as the title says, I'm having trouble getting any network activity at all.

She's running a clean install of 6.3, with no patches (yet) and I've tried several different switches, cables, and a couple of PROM settings to no avail.

ifconfig ec0 simply tells me that the connection is up, with the static settings that were entered into the Network Manager.
netstat -r looks right too, but I'm not managing to get anything out.

I'm not managing to get a link light at all on ANY switch, is there a PROM setting that will disable ec0 entirely?

hinv dump to follow when I'm back at work tomorrow....

To update...
No hinv dump as I didn't have time to get a serial console up to copy and paste it. However I'll take a picture tomorrow for your convenience.

Interestingly enough, the only mention I've seen of a problem is when I booted the installer on my CD saying that there was no carrier detected on ec0, and that's it!
netstat -in shows a load of packets leaving but none inbound, and I don't see anything in the syslog when I tail it after setting ifconfig ec0 -debug.

I get the feeling I'm going to be stuck using a SLIP connection to get it online, I can't find any resources that talk about disabling the controller entirely.
In the case that I can't get anything working, does anyone know of a way I can burn a copy of the IRIX 6.5 disks I made a backup of using Linux? I suspect that I'm going have a problem with the EFS filesystem and trying to burn it to disk.

Thanks again!

Hi Geo,

The output I get when tailing the Syslog simply says "ec0 is in Hardware Debug Mode" with no further output.
I ran tail with "-f" parameter so I could follow whilst trying different cables and switches but to no avail I'm afraid.

grepping the log for all mention of ec0 only tells me that no carrier was detected the first time IRIX booted in network mode after a clean install.

I should also mention that I ran the "System Diagnostics" suite from the PROM menu, which I believe completed without error ( I was asked to press "Return" when the test got to the ethernet controller with no other output, is this normal?), and running the Ethernet Controller Test and the Ethernet Controller Stress Test from the prompt also returned no output.

Unless anyone has any better ideas, I guess I've got a dead network controller

I managed to get a hinv dump over serial, for the curious:
-----
Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.3
with no AV Card or Camera.
FLASH PROM version 4.13
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board EPP/ECP parallel port
1 200 MHZ IP32 Processor
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 1.0
CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.1
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Main memory size: 256 Mbytes
Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
CRM graphics installed
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version ADAPTEC 7880
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880
Vice: TRE
----

Has anyone experienced similar issues before me?
I'm open to buying a working (or dead) O2 off of someone if they're willing, I've fallen in love with the blue toaster and I can't see myself living with a SLIP connection forever!

Hi geo,

I tried taking the system in and out of debug but without further success, I'll do a printenv tomorrow morning UK time, you might still be up when I do so!
I did do a resetenv to see if that'd clear anything, but nothing new there.

I'll burn a gentoo disk and a BSD disk and try booting them up, see if I can get any more useful information from there and post it up.

On a physical note, I can't see any scoring or bad solder joints on the mainboard tracing back from the RJ45 jack backwards.

Thanks again for your help.

Just quick update gents before I head to the pub:

I don't get the MAC address printed out from ifconfig on IRIX,
The gentoo live CD gives me a panic just after leaving the PROM about files not found on the CD
The BSD cd boots up OK, I can the MAC-110 identifying itself as part of the BSD boot, my MAC address is apparently 08:00:69:0c:c5:bd, still no link however

Ta for now!

Hi all,

Thanks for the suggestions so far, I'll run through what I've tried:

- Reseating the PCI carrier.
- 3 different known good switches, and 3 different good cables, tested with different systems including my Octane.
- Using OpenBSD;- The installer can't get a link on the mace0 controller.
- ifconfig ec0 debug then tailing the syslog.
- setting ec0mode in the PROM to various settings as suggested on techpubs.
- using resetenv to cleans the PROM.
- chkconfig auto_ipaddress on / off.
- chkconfig network on / off - This has the most effect, the system takes at least 5 minutes to boot with networking turned on!
- Clean install of IRIX.

Has anyone got any new ideas?
I'm working on securing a PCI card as a workaround because I don't want to put the toaster to pasture.