Segfault wrote:
I never said (MAC and PCI ID) have same purpose. You said it would be nice to have first 3 bytes to see the manufacturer.
No, I did not say that. I do not care about the manufacturer. Most often the OUI identifies the system manufacturer (HP), not the ethernet controller manufacturer (Intel). Big deal.
FWIW, I just wanted to check that the special bits in the MAC address first byte (unicast/multicast and global/local) were correctly set to 0. Sometimes the MAC address stored in the system NVAM is invalid, or the driver incorrectly reads it, resulting in an invalid MAC address being used, which can cause all kinds of trouble.
andoru wrote:Here's the first three bytes of the address: 3c:d9:2b
So the first two bits are 0. Good.
Segfault wrote:I'm going to read up on IPv6 now.
Check Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC), EUI-64 and IPv6 Privacy Extensions.
andoru wrote:Let me know what you want me to look for, and what commands to use.
Use
dmesg to print the kernel log buffer.
Look for messages containing the driver name (e1000e), the interface name (eno1), or the PCI bus ID (00:19.0).
andoru wrote:It's weird how it doesn't mention any dropped packets or errors/failures, as I went through a lot of dropped packets and connection timeouts during the session.
How then did you see there were dropped packets ? With
ifconfig or
ip -s link ?
andoru wrote:DNS resolution, AFAIK, works fine, as I have pinged domain names
You ping an IP address, not a domain name. The destination of an IP packet is an IP address, not a domain name.
A few thoughts.
- There can be variants of a same ethernet controller, and the driver may not work equally with all variants. The situation of Realtek RTL8168 and the kernel driver r8169 comes into mind. However Intel ethernet controllers and drivers have a better status.
- Did you try to disable offload optimizations with
ethtool ?
- Did you check the power supply voltages ? An insufficient or flaky voltage could cause erratic behaviour. I think about the +5V stand-by voltage (5VSB) which supplies the ethernet interface for wake-on-LAN. This output is always on even when the system is shut down, so it can wear out faster.
- There can be incompatibilities due to border cases between two ethernet devices. I once used a computer whose ethernet port did not work on one specific wall plug, while it worked on other plugs and other computers worked on this plug. Did you test the computer on another switch port, another switch, another network... ?