em(4) on FreeBSD is sometimes annoying

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 08:19:46AM +0000, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> On Friday 08 August 2008 06:31:24 pm Jack Vogel wrote:
> > OK, I just got access to a machine, am going to install and see if I
> > can repro this
> > this afternoon.
> >
> > Jack
> 
> For what it's worth, I have a T60 that dual boots 6.3-R/amd64 and 7.0-R/i386 
> and neither install has this problem.  I can cold boot it with the NIC 
> unplugged, plug in a cable, I get a link light and ifconfig em0 goes to 
> active, dhclient em0 gets an IP successfully.

As promised, I tested said issue out on my T60p (widescreen) tonight,
using both FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE and 7.0-RELEASE.

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue; so my experience was the same as
Josh.  I can also boot it with the CAT5 inserted, dhclient fetch an IP,
no LED oddities -- then yank the cable (LED and link light go off),
re-insert the cable, and within a moment or so dhclient again gets an
IP.

I'm left wondering if maybe there's an EEPROM setting that's doing this
(purely speculative on my part), or possibly some odd BIOS quirk.  My
T60p (widescreen) is running BIOS 1.14.  It's worth noting that the
non-widescreen T60p uses a different BIOS.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |