[mythtv-users] eth0 on Acer Revo 1600 doesn't grab an address at boot
Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us
Wed Jan 27 19:47:42 UTC 2010
There's been lots of talk of these machines here as cheap HD-capable frontends,
so I picked one up a couple weeks ago. At first, I threw Mythbuntu on it to
give it a shot. It played recordings and movies reasonably well, but there was
one snag: on reboot, the network interface wouldn't come up. Logging in at the
console and issuing "/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart" (or whatever the equivalent
is on Mythbuntu) would get it running, as would stopping and restarting from
the appropriate icon in the system tray. I'd like to eventually deploy the box
with just a remote control (probably the Playstation 3 Bluetooth remote, as it
and Bluetooth dongles are both cheap), so this could be a bit of a problem.
Thinking maybe it was something weird with Mythbuntu, I blew that off the
system and started installing Gentoo (which is what I normally use for Linux
installs). It, however, is exhibiting the same behavior: eth0 doesn't come up
from either a cold start or a reboot. /etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart gets it
running, but (again) that has to be issued from the console.
I found a page which suggested adding the following to
/etc/[modprobe.conf|modprobe.d/]:
alias eth0 forcedeth
options forcedeth optimization_mode=2 msi=1 dma_64bit=1 phy_power_down=0
The theory was that the driver normally shuts off the PHY, but doesn't know how
to bring it back up again. This, however, hasn't fixed my problem.
In the meantime, I'm still building MythTV, Ratpoison, and some other apps on
this box in preparation for making it a frontend. Once deployed, it'll stay
powered up all the time, so I could live with eth0 not waking up after a reboot
if I must...but it'd be nice to fix it so I don't have to do this.
(The Gentoo setup is currently using vanilla-sources 2.6.32.5...would've used
gentoo-sources, but it kept getting stuck on one of the patches. Mythbuntu was
the most recent version available. Both were AMD64 installs, not x86. The
desired behavior is to grab an address via DHCP; if it matters, that service is
on a Linksys WRT54GL running OpenWRT Kamikaze.)
Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us
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