re0 - no carrier

Hi,

I installed FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE i386 version today. It's supposed to be my router, so it has two network adapters: re0 and rl0.

Everything worked fine at the morning with my old 8.0 server (or was it even an older version?). After I made a fresh install with 9.1-RELEASE I now can't get re0 to connect as it keeps on saying "no carrier". I haven't touched the cables, so they are fine.

However, the router I have connected to re0 now only lights up the 100 M light instead of the 1000 M light. I don't know why, since this network adapter is a gigabit adapter.

I am overwhelmed. I tried ifconfig media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex but still no carrier. This was recommended somewhere after a ton of Googling.

I also tried setting media to 1000TX as suggested elsewhere, but still no effect.

I tried to switch the cable to a different slot in the switch but it lights the orange 100 M light in every port. Can't get it to light up the green 1 Gb light. And can't get it to find carrier signal...

An update to the situation: I made a clean new install and seems everytime I boot up the system the state is "active" but once I run ifconfig re0 inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.224 it goes from active to no carrier. I also tried another switch and cable but didn't work with them neither.

What type of Realtek chipset does the card use?

It's an onboard NIC, Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet

I think that the onboard NIC is FUBAR. I tested the amd64 version of the 9.1-RELEASE and the lights on both ends of the cable (switch and PC) turned of with that version. After the power off/on cycle the lights are back on, but still no working NIC.

Finally I installed Windows Vista on it and in Device Manager it says I tried taking out the other LAN-adapter and disabling and enabling the onboard NIC from the BIOS, but it won't work with Windows either.

So now the question is: is it possible for the freebsd FreeBSD installation to break hardware? After all, the onboard NIC worked perfectly before I started installing 9.1-RELEASE.

Edit: the only thing I can come up with is that I have burned the LAN port/chipset with static electricity when plugging in the USB-memory for installing freebsd FreeBSD. Still I'm not completely satisfied with this solution since when I had no operating system for a moment, it tried to make a netboot and my DHCP server tells me it did assign IP to it.

Reset the BIOS settings by clearing the CMOS RAM as instructed in the manual of your motherboard, if the NIC still doesn't work then there is something wrong on hardware level. In general it's not possible to break hardware from software but who knows what Realtek has done with their chips since they are so tight lipped about their products that most of the open source drivers for Realtek NICs are a result of reverse engineering. Things that can destroy hardware from software are accidental re-flash of the firmware of the device with junk data or failing to set suitable power saving mode on a GPU or a CPU and causing overheating.

Edit: Try a "cold" boot first, disconnect the power cord for about 10 minutes and then see if Windows recognizes the device. Devices like NICs have internal state information that usually survives between reboots. A cold boot is required to fully reset this state.

That is what I would have done, but it seems to be impossible. There is no simple "restore defaults" in the BIOS menu for soft resetting. And there is no way to hard reset. I tried to take off the battery: only reset the clock. I tried to use the on board jumper: only resets the password.

Am now downloading 8.4-RELEASE to see what it says.

kpa said:

Edit: Try a "cold" boot first, disconnect the power cord for about 10 minutes and then see if Windows recognizes the device. Devices like NICs have internal state information that usually survives between reboots. A cold boot is required to fully reset this state.

Click to expand...

That is what I would have tried next. However everything started working 100% after I downloaded and installed the latest drivers from Realtek with the Vista installation. I dunno don't know if I should try 9.1-RELEASE once more or should I just go with the 8.4-RELEASE.

That probably means that the Windows driver was able to reset the NIC to a sane state, the FreeBSD driver couldn't do that for some reason.

Yep. And after reinstalling 9.1-RELEASE the NIC is dead again. Seems the driver has broken somewhere between 8.0 and 9.1-RELEASE.

Any suggestions?

Enter a PR or report it to the freebsd-net mailing list.

I made a PR, reinstalled Windows to get the LAN back alive and I am now installing 8.4-RELEASE where the NIC seems to be working.

Thanks for all your time with this problem!

I came across this thread while googling the issue. This is a Clevo laptop with a Realtek NIC and Intel wireless (which worked out of the box). For me, I solved it by running freebsd-update fetch;freebsd-update install and upon reboot, re0 was able to get an address without issue.