• From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,947

Topic: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

A cute new arrival in the house, little Vaio laptop on long-term loan from a friend, has a couple of personality flaws unfortunately. (The slow boot time issue I'll post on separately.)

I just can't establish a wired network connection.
The eth0 card is detected by the system (Marvell Yukon Gigabit 88E8055), but Network Manager can't establish a dynamic DHCP connection with my modem. The same LAN cable, unplugged from the Vaio and plugged into this IBM desktop, works fine, as with all the (4) other boxes in the house, running Debian Woody, Windows 98, Crunchbang 9.04.02, Slitaz live, Ubuntu Breexy up to Jaunty...

This Vaio came with Ubuntu Karmic installed, and I put Statler alpha2 on another partition to see if it would do better, but no joy.

Next up was to try static IP settings instead of DHCP. I picked up the IPs being used by the IBM with 

route -n

and the DNS settings with 

cat /etc/resolv.conf

and put them into Network Manager as static settings for eth0 and it worked OK on the IBM. Tried the same settings on the Vaio and the Network Manager says "network established", but nothing actually gets though. 'route -n' looks OK, but 'ping google.com' or 'ping 74.125.45.100' (Google's IP) just hang, or return "cannot be reached".

Next, tried installing wicd instead of Network Manager, downloading deb and all dependencies on another box. Made no difference.

Next tried downloading the sk98lin driver for the ethernet card from Marvell to replace the sky2 module, along with kernel header files, numerous dependencies and compiled the new module. All very exciting, and seemed to work OK but made no difference at all.

The next day I discovered a PC card slot on the side of the Vaio and plugged in a LAN card I knew was working OK. It was detected as eth1, and the network manager (now wicd) allowed me to set up a static connection just as with eth0, which failed to work in the same way... sad

To summarize:
The modem (from cable TV to LAN cable) works fine on several other machines with a variety of OSs, using both DHCP and static IPs.
The vaio refuses to connect with any method I try, running Ubuntu or Statler, using nm or wicd, using sky2 or sk98lin, using either of two different ethernet cards, one of which definitely works on other computers. Although the network managers (nm or wicd) seem to think the connection is OK with static settings, nothing gets through. DHCP won't work at all.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received, and I'll be glad to post the results of any commands you think might be relevant.
Cheers.

Last edited by johnraff (2010-07-21 05:08:52)

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“Good morning sir, which way up would you like your reality today?”  "As it comes, Jeeves, as it comes..."

johnraff's Website

  • From: Dusk Till Dawn
  • Registered: 2009-07-02
  • Posts: 4,340

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

maybe you just need to write your own interfaces file? I generally delete the file which is written by nm-applet, remove all connections in the interface, and write this:

#/etc/network/interfaces 

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.36
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

the network i bring up with 

/etc/init.d/networking restart

(if i remember right)



nm-applet then shows that there is no connection, but i dont care about it. I think I never managed to get a connection through nm-applet - or only after writing the above mentioned file. Of course replace the addresses with those relevant to your network.
By the way, pinging google or an ip results for me in no response, too. Not that I would care smile Everything else works fine.

Hope this brings you a step closer.

★ STATLER ლ(ಠ益ಠლ Y U NO WALDORF?  ★ #!11 ★
  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,947

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

Thanks machinebacon, I'll give that a try.

re pinging - I'm pretty sure that if your network is up you should be able to ping any site you can connect to...

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“Good morning sir, which way up would you like your reality today?”  "As it comes, Jeeves, as it comes..."

johnraff's Website

  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,947

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

@machinebacon thanks for your suggestion, but writing the interfaces file made no difference. sad

It's so weird - the modem works fine on other boxes, eth0 is detected fine on Ubuntu & Statler both, just no network connection! Even a LAN card which worked on another box fails here when plugged into the PCI socket, although detected, so it can't be a physical problem with the LAN socket or connection. The only thing I can think of is something with the BIOS? A strange "security" device blocking outside connections?

Are there any network utilities I could use to try to track this down?

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“Good morning sir, which way up would you like your reality today?”  "As it comes, Jeeves, as it comes..."

johnraff's Website

  • From: Dusk Till Dawn
  • Registered: 2009-07-02
  • Posts: 4,340

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

john,
on another forum somebody mentioned to add the parameter 'acpi=off' to the kernel line at boot. I don't think it makes a big change (as the card is detected), but you could try smile

★ STATLER ლ(ಠ益ಠლ Y U NO WALDORF?  ★ #!11 ★
  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,947

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

Hi machinebacon, unfortunately that didn't work either sad
Could you post a link to that forum, so I can see if there might be any other hints?

All I've found here is in the output of 'dmesg', some sections like this (I can't copy/paste so typing by hand):

sk98lin 0000:06:00.0 irq 27 for MSI/MSI-X
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
eth0: network connection up using port A
     interrupt ...
    ....
    ....
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
eth0: network connection down
sk98lin 0000:06:00.0 irq 27 for MSI/MSI-X
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
sk98lin 0000:06:00.0 irq 27 for MSI/MSI-X
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
eth0: network connection up using port A
     interrupt ...
    ....
    ....
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
eth0: network connection down

(repeats a couple of times)

So the network's not up at boot; later the managers seem to think they've connected OK, though they haven't.

Last edited by johnraff (2010-07-14 05:35:12)

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“Good morning sir, which way up would you like your reality today?”  "As it comes, Jeeves, as it comes..."

johnraff's Website

  • From: Dusk Till Dawn
  • Registered: 2009-07-02
  • Posts: 4,340

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

Hello John,
that's the german forum, pointing to actually what you have done before (sk98lin) : http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/netzw … st-1572741

I have no idea about Cable Modems in Debian, so I did a quick read about them here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Cable-Modem/#DHCP and found that a DHCP client apparently needs to be installed. As I really have no idea about it, I just send you the link smile

★ STATLER ლ(ಠ益ಠლ Y U NO WALDORF?  ★ #!11 ★
  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,947

Re: [SOLVED]Sony vaio weird wired network issue

Thanks for your help, machinebacon. I've marked this thread [SOLVED], but it's really just worked-around.

For the benefit of anyone who might find this in the future:

*) Short answer: use a router, set it to send the same MAC address to the modem as the computer which worked up to now.

*) Verbose version: There's nothing wrong with the Vaio per se, the problem seemed to be that the modem didn't want to talk to it. The same generous friend the other day passed on a wireless router he no longer used, and the Vaio was quite able to talk to it, via wireless or via cable. However the router in turn was unable to connect to the modem, either with DHCP or with static settings. However, it (Buffalo WHR-G) has a nice web-style settings interface, where I found a place where you can change the MAC address (hardware address) that the router sends to the modem. 'ifconfig' on my regular desktop gave me the MAC address that that computer was sending out, and when I set the router to use the same address... that magical moment when a network springs into life! big_smile

So why did the 3 other old computers in the house work too, without any such tricks? No idea - could it be that old machines use more primitive protocols that the modem just tolerated? More, there's that LAN card that worked on an old box, but not on the Vaio - presumably sending out the same MAC address in each case...

Anyway network's up now and I celebrated with a mass of updating/upgrading. smile

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“Good morning sir, which way up would you like your reality today?”  "As it comes, Jeeves, as it comes..."

johnraff's Website