Sérgio's blog » Hardware http://www.smachado.com About computers, software, gadgets, programming and more.... Sun, 16 May 2010 20:40:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 No link light while connecting to network http://www.smachado.com/2009/09/no-link-light-while-connecting-to-network/ http://www.smachado.com/2009/09/no-link-light-while-connecting-to-network/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:57:31 +0000 smachado http://www.smachado.com/?p=115 I got a new laptop to work with and noticed that if I plugged a network cable into it to connect to certain networks sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t – I couldn’t even see a link light at the socket.

I thought this would be a driver issue of the laptop so I was ready to find a new driver for this network card.

So I opened Control Panel and System Properties. Then I clicked the Hardware tab and opened Device Manager.

At Device Manager I expanded Network Adapters tab and selected the ethernet controller of my laptop. I right clicked it and opened the properties window. My initial purpose was to find the driver version but I started looking at the settings.

So I selected the Advanced tab and eventually Speed & Duplex. Wait.. why is it set to 100 Mb Full? Hummm…. let me change that to Auto. Bingo… After applying the change I got a 1.0Gbs connection…

]]> http://www.smachado.com/2009/09/no-link-light-while-connecting-to-network/feed/ 0 CentOS 4.2 and nforce drivers (forcedeth issue) http://www.smachado.com/2008/12/centos-42-and-nforce-drivers-forcedeth-issue/ http://www.smachado.com/2008/12/centos-42-and-nforce-drivers-forcedeth-issue/#comments Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:23:11 +0000 Sergio http://www.smachado.com/?p=11 Today I had to install CentOS 64 bit on a desktop built on an ASUS P5N32-E SLI motherboard. This motherboard features a nForce 680i SLI chipset and other fancy stuff that are likely to cause trouble to Linux distributions, specially old versions.

I decided to go for CentOS 4.2 just because I had it available on a DVD from a magazine, it was 64-bit and as an entreprise distribution it should be stable.

Installation was straightforward although I had to specify the drivers to use for hard disk (sata_nv) just before it started.

Upon login into my new installation I noticed I didn’t had any ethernet interfaces configured. This motherboard has two gigabit ethernet interfaces. They should use forcedeth driver from nvidia but they’re not working. Loading forcedeth manually didn’t do it . Also using options msi=0 msix=0 also didn’t do it.

So I decided to download the most recent kernel package for CentOS 4 which is kernel-smp-2.6.9-78.0.8.EL.x86_64.rpm. I downloaded from another computer to an usb stick and copied over to my CentOS 4 host. Then as root I executed the command: rpm -i kernel-smp-2.6.9-78.0.8.EL.x86_64.rpm and rebooted.

After booting using the new kernel the system was able to find my ethernet devices. Aditionally it also found my onboard sound card.

After configuring them I was able to get network on my new system.

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