motherboard ethernet port failing

[Digimer]

I've had lots of Realtek NICs fail. I now avoid them like the plague. 
For my last mainboard for home, I spent quite some time looking for a 
board without a Realtek NIC on it.

You can get a nice Intel PCIe NIC for <$40. It's night-and-day better, 
quality and performance wise.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106033

I've bought dozens of them and have had only one fail, and that was 
after it got tossed around outside a static bag for quite some time.

So yes, I would not at all be surprised if your NIC was dead.

On 04/11/2013 02:51 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I have a Gigabit GA-P43T-ES3G motherboard (socket 775) with an
> on-board RTL8111/8168B ethernet controller.
>
> The day before yesterday, under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the network
> connection went away.  I poked around with Network Manager but had no
> luck getting it to work.
>
> I had two different USB to ethernet adapters that I tried but Ubuntu
> 10.04 didn't recognize them.
>
> The on-board adapter started working again.  I took that opportunity to
> upgrade Ubuntu from 10.04 to 12.04, and that worked.  The first USB to
> ethernet adapter that I tried worked under 12.04.
>
> Then eth0 stopped working again.
>
> I'm pretty sure that it is the adapter or connector because I did a lot of
> experiments:
>
> - switched ethernet cables
>
> - switched ports on the ethernet switch
>
> - was able to get other computers to work with the same cable and
>    switch port
>
> - (eventually) was able to get this same computer to work with a USB
>    ethernet adapter and the same cable and same switch port
>
> There were several reboots during this time.
>
> When it is not working, ifconfig shows that the interface is UP.  RX
> packets can be non-zero but TX packets are 0.  I never see any error
> count.  Here's an example:
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 1c:6f:65:a0:67:27
>            UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>            RX packets:29 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>            TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>            collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>            RX bytes:3750 (3.7 KB)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
>            Interrupt:45 Base address:0xc000
> Notice that no address has been assigned (normally done by my DHCP server).
>
> 'mii-tool -v eth0' says:
> eth0: no link
>    product info: vendor 00:07:32, model 17 rev 2
>    basic mode:   autonegotiation enabled
>    basic status: no link
>    capabilities: 1000baseT-HD 1000baseT-FD 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD
>    advertising:  1000baseT-FD 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD flow-control
>    link partner: 1000baseT-HD 1000baseT-FD 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD flow-control
>
> 'sudo mii-tool -w eth0' says:
> 20:12:28 eth0: no link
> 20:12:38 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:12:39 eth0: no link
> 20:12:46 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:12:47 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:13:11 eth0: no link
> 20:15:11 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:15:12 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:15:51 eth0: no link
> 20:17:57 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:17:58 eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
> 20:18:30 eth0: no link
>
>
>  From my observations, I think that it is a hardware problem on the
> motherboard.  It could just be the connector.
>
> Does anyone have an idea of what's likely going on and whether it
> might be something easily fixed?
>
> Any suggestions for experiments?
>
> (I don't want to break the machine: it is a "production" MythTV box.
> The USB interface solution is OK.  The box doesn't have any available
> PCI or PCIe slots.)
> --
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-- 
Digimer
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