em(4) on FreeBSD is sometimes annoying

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 11:34:48AM +0200, Martin wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 10:34:47 -0700
> "Jack Vogel" <jfvogel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Telling me what kind of NIC it is isn't going to help, 82573's are
> > working the world over :)  What exactly is your laptop, what model,
> > is the NIC a LOM (on the motherboard) or some addin.
> 
> Hi Jack,
> 
> this is a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p model 2007-93G. It's the standard
> built-in NIC by Lenovo on the mainboard.

I also have a T60p (though a different model/type number).

Note that the BIOSes for the T60p have historically documented numerous
changes to how the NIC is initialised and "fiddled with", **especially**
if PXE booting is enabled (regardless if a PXE boot itself is performed
or not).  My employer sent a company-wide message to all owners of the
T60p asking that they upgrade their BIOS solely to address link
negotiation failures occasionally seen when PXE booting.

Meaning: I would not be surprised if this issue proved to be something
specific to Lenovo laptops, possibly this model.

When I return to work on Wednesday night, I'll try to reproduce what you
see (we have Juniper, Cisco, Extreme, and Netgear switches there), then
bring the laptop home and test against a D-Link switch, as well as my
ProCurve.

I can tell you that I have absolutely no problems under Windows Vista
when pulling the CAT5 cable out and reinserting it; and yes, DHCP is
used.  (I do this literally on a nightly basis, which is how/why I'm so
sure.)

-- 
| 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 |