Solution: r8169 "link down" bug

[ebrombaugh]

I recently migrated to a new motherboard with an r8169 ethernet interface. I installed Fedora 13 and it had been running fine for several weeks when suddenly my network disappeared. Studying the syslogs turned up this:

Aug 29 18:49:21 lynnie kernel: r8169: eth0: link down
Aug 29 18:49:21 lynnie kernel: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready

A bit of googling revealed that this has been a known issue with the r8169 driver for several years. The device will randomly fail autonegotiation and refuse to come up, sometimes after weeks of working fine. The fix is to use ethtool to disable autonegotiation sometime between loading the driver module and when Network Manager tries to bring it up. I did this by adding the new file /etc/modprobe.d/r8169.conf with the following:

# turn off autonegotiation on the r8169 ethernet driver
install r8169 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install r8169 && /usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off

This appears to work. Hopefully it can be useful to someone else.

Eric

[dglent]

[...]

This appears to work. Hopefully it can be useful to someone else.

Eric

Thanks a lot, i searched in google without solution for me until i found this post!!!

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=828277
Thanks many times

[simpleblue]

The solution you gave worked perfect for me. Such an easy workaround - Thanks!!