Juniper e3k with ports limitied to 100Mbit and re NICs on MSI MoBo: problems with duplex negotiation (Hetzner host provider discard FreeBSD support due this bug)

[Yamagi Burmeister]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2011, Lev Serebryakov wrote:

>  Very large and famous (due to very attractive prices) hosting
> provider Hetzner.de discards FreeBSD support on dedicated servers,
> because these servers can niot negotiate 100Mbit/DUPLEX when
> switches' ports are limited to 100Mbit (1Gbit connection costs
> additional money) only under FreeBSD. Linux works fine.
>
>  Switches known to be Juniper e3k series.
>
>  MoBos of servers are different assortment of MSI MoBos with Realtek
> (re driver) network-on-board.
>
>  Symptjms are: NIC can not negotiate/set duplex when switch port is
> limited to 100Mbit/Duplex. Duplex can not be set even manually via
> "ifconfig":
>
>
> media: Ethernet 100baseTX <full-duplex> (100baseTX <half-duplex>)
>
>  Is it know problem? Maybe, -CURRENT driver has fix for it?
>
>  Unfortunately, I can not provide more information, as I don't have
> server at Hetzner (I'm planning to order one, but due to these
> problems, I'm not sure now, as I need FreeBSD), and all this
> information is collected in communication with people who HAVE servers
> with FreeBSD installed.

Hi,
I've got several Hetzner EQ4 and on all these machines FreeBSD 8.1 runs
just fine. I've never seen this strange negotiation problem myself. But
maybe I was just lucky and got working mainboard and nic combinations.
So if further information is needed, I'm happy to provide it.

Some data:

% ifconfig re0
   re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
     options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
     [snip]
     nd6 options=3<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV>
     media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
     status: active

$ dmesg
   re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xfbeff000-0xfbefffff,0xf6ff0000-0xf6ffffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci6
   re0: Using 1 MSI messages
   re0: Chip rev. 0x3c000000
   re0: MAC rev. 0x00400000
   miibus0: <MII bus> on re0
   rgephy0: <RTL8169S/8110S/8211B media interface> PHY 1 on miibus0
   rgephy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
   re0: Ethernet address: 40:61:86:f3:d7:20
   re0: [FILTER]

Also have a look at the FreeBSD section in the Hetzner Wiki:
http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/FreeBSD
It's in german but Google can translate it :)

Ciao,
Yamagi

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