Comment 2 for bug 621343

Thanks for your response, Mathieu.

1) My main issue was (still is) Ubuntu 10.4 not turning off the NIC at
shutdown, unlike Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows Vista.

2) The "affect" that brought this to my attention was the "poisoning" (not
really a "zombie state") of the switch after several minutes.

 - Various web postings indicate this may be an old problem with Marvell
Yukon 88E8056 NIC using the sky2 driver.

 - In fact OSX fails to connect prior to getting the "transmitter hung"
message.

 - I found that in order to restore my network I really only needed to power
off the PC altogether, or else just restart Ubuntu. No need to restart OSX
or the router, so the problem is confined to the switch.

3) Resolution is as follows:

 - I can work around "NIC not powered off" by always doing "sudo ifconfig
eth1 down" before issuing shutdown.

 - I got, compiled, installed driver module sk98lin.ko from Acer's web site
and found the problem went away. The NIC now stays powered on still, but
it's inactive: you don't see it "beaconing" as with the original 10.4
sky2.ko driver module, by which I mean the light on the router for that port
remains solid, whereas with sky2 it would keep flashing.

4) Re. "working as designed":

 - I had not appreciated that Network Manager is not intended to power off
the NIC. I can understand that this might be necessary in some usage
scenarios, but these are "green times"...

 - Wake on LAN is disabled in my BIOS and it's setting as reported by
ethtool has been "d" (none) throughout.

 - Perhaps you can suggest a different place to put the "bug report"?

5) Re. packet trace:

 - I don't have 3rd system to use to run the packet trace as suggested, but
I ran ettercap on OSX to trace both MAC addresses. The trace ends at the
point when the Ubuntu machine is shut down. I have no way to trace the
switch.

6) Other hardware/software:

 - Along the way I changed the WRT54Gv2 router firmware from stock Linksys
to Tomato v1.28. This made no difference.

 - OX 10.4.11 is way old and so is my Mac Mini PPC late 2005 (just before
they switched to Intel CPU), so these are not going to change. The Mac's
motherboard and NIC both checked out fine. I've no way to see if newer Macs
handle it differently, but the real "affect" of the problem is at the
switch.

 - I uninstalled Network Manager but I get exactly get the same problem
using WICD.

With this information now, would you suggest reopening the bug report or
reassigning it elsewhere? I can easily recreate the problem if more
documentation is required.

Thanks again,

Michael Cook

P.S There are still a couple of things you didn't comment about:

 - In /etc/Network Manager/nm-system-settings.conf .. it says
"managed=false" in the [ifupdown] section. I would expect this to be
"managed=true", altho' making that change made no difference.

 - In "/etc/Network Manager/system-connections/Wired connection 1" I
noticed that the leading zero of the MAC address is not present in the
[802-3-ethernet] section .. it says "mac-address=0:19:21:ef:a6:22",
although the address appears correctly in System > Preferences >
Network Connections.

[End].