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MII-DIAG(8)                 System Manager's Manual                MII-DIAG(8)

NAME
       mii-diag - Network adapter control and monitoring
SYNOPSIS
       mii-diag [options]<interface>
DESCRIPTION
       This manual page documents briefly the mii-diag network adapter control
       and monitoring  command.   Addition  documentation  is  available  from
       http://scyld.com/diag/index.html.

       This mii-diag command configures, controls and monitors the transceiver
       management registers for  network  interfaces,  and  configures  driver
       operational  parameters.   For  transceiver  control  mii-diag uses the
       Media Independent Interface (MII) standard (thus the command name).  It
       also  has  additional Linux-specific controls to communicate parameters
       such as message enable settings and  buffer  sizes  to  the  underlying
       device driver.
       The  MII  standard  defines  registers  that control and report network
       transceiver capabilities, link settings and errors.  Examples are  link
       speed,  duplex, capabilities advertised to the link partner, status LED
       indications and link error counters.

OPTIONS
       The mii-diag command supports both single  character  and  long  option
       names.   Short  options  use a single dash ('-') in front of the option
       character.  For options without parameters,  multiple  options  may  be
       concatenated  after  a  single  dash.  Long options are prefixed by two
       dashes ('--'), and may be abbreviated with a  unique  prefix.   A  long
       option may take a parameter of the form --arg=param or --arg param.

       A summary of options is as follows.

       -A, --advertise <speed|setting>
               -F, --fixed-speed <speed|setting>
              Speed  is one of: 100baseT4, 100baseTx, 100baseTx-FD, 100baseTx-
              HD, 10baseT, 10baseT-FD, 10baseT-HD.  For more  precise  control
              an explicit numeric register setting is also allowed.

       -a, --all-interfaces
              Show  the  status  of all interfaces.  This option is not recom-
              mended with any other option, especially ones that  change  set-
              tings.

       -s,--status
              Return exit status 2 if there is no link beat.

       -D     Increase  the  debugging  level.  This may be used to understand
              the actions the command is taking.

       -g, --read-parameters
              Show driver-specific parameters.

       -G, --set-parameters value[,value...]
              Set driver-specific parameters.  Set a adapter-specific  parame-
              ters.   Parameters  are  comma  separated, with missing elements
              retaining the existing value.

       -v     Increase the verbosity level.  Additional "-v" options  increase
              the level further.

       -V     Show the program version information.

       -w, --watch
              Continuously monitor the transceiver and report changes.

       -?     Emit usage information.

DESCRIPTION
       Calling  the  command  with  just the interface name produces extensive
       output describing the transceiver capabilities, configuration and  cur-
       rent status.

       The '--monitor' option allows scripting link beat changes.
       This  option is similar to --watch, but with lower overhead and simpli-
       fied output.  It polls the interface only once a second and the  output
       format is a single line per link change with three fixed words
         <unknown|down||negotiating|up> <STATUS> <PARTNER-CAP>
       Example output:  mii-diag --monitor eth0
          down         0x7809 0x0000
          negotiating  0x7829 0x45e1
          up           0x782d 0x45e1
          down         0x7809 0x0000

       This may be used as
         mii-diag --monitor eth0 |
           while read linkstatus bmsr linkpar; do
            case $linkstatus in
               up)   ifup eth0 ;;
               down) ifdown eth0 ;;
            esac
           done

       It  may  be useful to shorten the DHCP client daemon timeout if it does
       not receive an address by adding the following setting to  /etc/syscon-
       fig/network: DHCPCDARGS="-t 3"

SEE ALSO
       ether-wake(8),net-diag(8),mii-tool(8).
       Addition         documentation         is         available        from
       http://scyld.com/diag/index.html.

KNOWN BUGS
       The --all-interfaces option is quirky.  There  are  very  few  settings
       that are usefully applied to all interfaces.

AUTHOR
       The manual pages, diagnostic commands, and many of the underlying Linux
       network drivers were written by Donald Becker for the Scyld Beowulf(tm)
       cluster system.


Scyld Beowulftm                September 9, 2003                   MII-DIAG(8)