What is disabling my ethernet port at shutdown?

I notice that something is now turning off or disabling my ethernet
port during shutdown. I don't even get a link light.

During boot up, the port get re-enabled when the network driver gets
loaded.

While I realize this is intended as a security precaution (and it is a
good one), it is a bit irritating that I don't have a working network
port when I shutdown linux and boot into Windows. Windows doesn't
re-enable the port.

I've made two changes that could have caused this behavior to start.

I upgraded the ethernet driver (broadcomm 4401 - v 3.0.7.1). The docs
for the bcm4400 driver don't mention anything that would do this. The
Wake-On-Lan is disabled by default.

The other change was to upgrade the kernel. I'm running vanilla RH 9
with updates. I just installed the kernel (v2.4.20-28.9) made
available from RH last week.

Any help on where to look to prevent the port from getting disabled
would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Michael

In comp.os.linux.hardware Michael Knight <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I notice that something is now turning off or disabling my ethernet
> port during shutdown.

I think that is a standard behavours when you shutdown a machine,
actually I've never checked what happen to my machine but I think
that is the same.

> Windows doesn't re-enable the port.

So, maybe the problem isn't in Linux but is in the way Windows handle
the network driver. I'd check if there is an updated driver for
Windows.

Davide

--
| Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware Solaris: Because you
| don't need to reboot to add hardware Windows: Because rebooting is for
| adding hardware, adding software, regularly scheduled downtime, and
| should also be done on a daily basis to keep the machine running.

Michael Knight wrote:
> I notice that something is now turning off or disabling my ethernet
> port during shutdown. I don't even get a link light.
>
This is standard. What else would you expect to happen?
> During boot up, the port get re-enabled when the network driver gets
> loaded.
>
Again, this is expected.

> While I realize this is intended as a security precaution (and it is a
> good one), it is a bit irritating that I don't have a working network
> port when I shutdown linux and boot into Windows. Windows doesn't
> re-enable the port.
Its not security, its just common practice. During shutdown all the
system hardware is brought to a "safe state". Data is flushed to disk,
file systems are unmounted, networks are brought down, etc.
As for windows not re-enabling the network card, that sounds like a
windows issue.

>
> I've made two changes that could have caused this behavior to start.
>
> I upgraded the ethernet driver (broadcomm 4401 - v 3.0.7.1). The docs
> for the bcm4400 driver don't mention anything that would do this. The
> Wake-On-Lan is disabled by default.
>
> The other change was to upgrade the kernel. I'm running vanilla RH 9
> with updates. I just installed the kernel (v2.4.20-28.9) made
> available from RH last week.
>
> Any help on where to look to prevent the port from getting disabled
> would be appreciated.
>
Perhaps you are misusing the term "disabling the port". What exactly
happened when you shutdown the machine previous to your upgrades?
Certainly regardless of your driver/kernel versions, a power off
shutdown of the computer resulted in a "disabling of the port". Is it
just that windows was able to bring the network card back up previously,
adn now it cant?

Neil
> Thanks,
>
> Michael


--
Neil Horman
Red Hat, Inc., http://people.redhat.com/nhorman
gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1, http://www.keyserver.net

Neil Horman <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message > >
> > Any help on where to look to prevent the port from getting disabled
> > would be appreciated.
> >
> Perhaps you are misusing the term "disabling the port". What exactly
> happened when you shutdown the machine previous to your upgrades?
> Certainly regardless of your driver/kernel versions, a power off
> shutdown of the computer resulted in a "disabling of the port". Is it
> just that windows was able to bring the network card back up previously,
> adn now it cant?
>

Prior to the upgrades, I got a link light as long as there was power
on, regardless of what state the machine was in or what operating
system it was loading/running.

I did wonder if perhaps BroadComm had simply introduced that feature
into their drivers. So I did retrieve the appropriate/equivalent
driver for Windows XP and installed it. It does not re-enable to port
at boot, nor am I able to do so anytime after that unless I reboot
into Linux.

I can always go back to using the old driver, but that makes me
nervous that eventually it won't be compatible due to kernel changes
and I'll be stuck.

Any other suggestions?

-Michael