Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 57767
anaconda does not set full_duplex for Dlink DFE-530TX so NFS install randomly hangs (timeout)
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:38:48 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [fr] (WinNT; I) Description of problem: Many PCI cards using the via-rhine driver need full_duplex=1 option, especially with busy networks. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. kickstart RH7.2 on several machines with DFE 530 net card in the same subnet 2. 3. Actual Results: The new kickstart shipping with RedHat 7.2 does find the DFE 530 card, request for a driver disk and automatically load the via-rhine driver. So far so good... but no way to set the full_duplex option to 1. So nfs installation crashed randomly when the card looses the network connection in half duplex mode. In Redhat 7.1 kickstart, I used to press F2, insert the driver disk, select the via-rhine driver, clicks on "option" and type full_duplex=1 and everything was fine... Now with the automatic detection and loading, no way to set the full_duplex... I did try to add some lines in the via-rhine section of the modinfo file of the driver disk such as: full_duplex "1" full_duplex "full_duplex (0=no; 1=yes) but I never got any success... Additional info:
You should be able to put device eth via-rhine --opts full_duplex=1 in your kickstart config.
I did try your suggestion with no success. the "correct syntax", at least that one that do not give a TypeError in kickstart.py is network --device eth0 via-rhine opts full_duplex=1 ( no -- before opts) but it does not solve the infamous "Transmit timeout problem". It looks like opts parameter is simply ignored . I also tried network --device eth0 via-rhine options full_duplex=1 No difference... I think the problem is with the via-rhine driver. Donald Becker has released a new version (1.08) that use an extra pci-scan.o module, but so far these modules do not load on 2.4 Kernels ( bad dependencies...). I give up using these cards DLINK DFE-530TX cards... ( see http://lhd.zdnet.com/db/dispproduct.php3?DISP?296) for many others that have bad opinions on this card... I think you should discontinue supporting the via-rhine driver in KickStart until the driver becomes more reliable.
No, the device line should be a completely separate line in your kickstart config, not at the end of the network line.