[mythtv-users] eth0 on Acer Revo 1600 doesn't grab an address at boot

[Scott Alfter]

There's been lots of talk of these machines here as cheap HD-capable frontends, 
so I picked one up a couple weeks ago.  At first, I threw Mythbuntu on it to 
give it a shot.  It played recordings and movies reasonably well, but there was 
one snag: on reboot, the network interface wouldn't come up.  Logging in at the 
console and issuing "/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart" (or whatever the equivalent 
is on Mythbuntu) would get it running, as would stopping and restarting from 
the appropriate icon in the system tray.  I'd like to eventually deploy the box 
with just a remote control (probably the Playstation 3 Bluetooth remote, as it 
and Bluetooth dongles are both cheap), so this could be a bit of a problem.

Thinking maybe it was something weird with Mythbuntu, I blew that off the 
system and started installing Gentoo (which is what I normally use for Linux 
installs).  It, however, is exhibiting the same behavior: eth0 doesn't come up 
from either a cold start or a reboot.  /etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart gets it 
running, but (again) that has to be issued from the console.

I found a page which suggested adding the following to 
/etc/[modprobe.conf|modprobe.d/]:

alias eth0 forcedeth
options forcedeth optimization_mode=2 msi=1 dma_64bit=1 phy_power_down=0

The theory was that the driver normally shuts off the PHY, but doesn't know how 
to bring it back up again.  This, however, hasn't fixed my problem.

In the meantime, I'm still building MythTV, Ratpoison, and some other apps on 
this box in preparation for making it a frontend.  Once deployed, it'll stay 
powered up all the time, so I could live with eth0 not waking up after a reboot 
if I must...but it'd be nice to fix it so I don't have to do this.

(The Gentoo setup is currently using vanilla-sources 2.6.32.5...would've used 
gentoo-sources, but it kept getting stuck on one of the patches.  Mythbuntu was 
the most recent version available.  Both were AMD64 installs, not x86.  The 
desired behavior is to grab an address via DHCP; if it matters, that service is 
on a Linksys WRT54GL running OpenWRT Kamikaze.)

Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us