[CentOS] RealTek 8168B (Rev 02) Issue

Mon Jun 8 16:51:24 UTC 2009
Ben Mohilef <benm at dsl-only.net>

It is an D945GCLF2 with a 330.

> use the r8169 driver

That driver has issues with the counters, resolved with the ElRepo and 
Realtek drivers. Ifconfig shows no dropped packets with the latter two 
drivers.

> website, it has been working fine, and I regularly check my tcpdump,
> dmesg even states that it enter promiscuous mode and exits > device
> eth0 entered promiscuous mode > device eth0 left promiscuous mode only

The dmesg statement comes from a printk statement in the  driver. I 
modified the driver to force the register to  always load
rx=AllowMe|AllowAll|AllowBroadcast|AllowMulticast.
I surrounded it with printk statements so I know that it is entering and exiting 
the rx setting. It acts like this variable is never being written to the chip 
register. Hmmm, I think I need to look at their code some more to make 
sure they ARE writing to the register.

Despite the kernel messages, the chip does not enter the promiscuous 
mode. If you have a second box talking to a third address, do you see that 
TCP traffic in TCPDump. Another way to check it is using iptraf.  



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