Quote:
The link lights on my machines don't normally light up until the driver initializes the card.

I was about to doubt myself and my comment and say "Ignore me! I think maybe I am lousing my mind!....Jim, this is a PC, not a switch or something!"

As a sanity test, though, I forced a PC here into a failed boot (set all boot devices to non-existent floppy) and I do indeed get a link state light at the point where it halts upon not finding a bootable partition/device -- no OS/driver. At this point, if I unplug the cable, link light goes out. This is what I would expect.

It very, very well may be that manufacturers implement layer 2 indicators differently and I just haven't grabbed that clue. I *have* encountered cases, though, where ethernet shows up in lspci et al as a valid device but the port still doesn't work (and no link light) because the electronic aspects of the interface are recognized but the actual physical interface is borked -- could be so simple as a bad pin/solder on RJ45.

Even with device recognition under the OS, if Rob's swapped in 2-3 other cables and another switch, that is one of the main things I would suspect.

Interesting, though
_________________________
Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.