Comment 78 for bug 212497

I've been having problems with the 8169 driver and RTL8111/8168B network card as well. I'm not 100% sure if this is the same issue, but I suspect it might be.

Anyway, the issue I was seeing was that the network card was properly detected, but did not do proper link detection (no connection and no lights were enabled on the switch). Some digging around turned out that the r8169 driver does not properly turn on the PHY part of the network card. Normally this is not a problem, except when it gets turned off. This is a problem when running in dual boot with Windows, since the windows driver turns off the PHY on shutdown (but only when Wake On LAN is disabled, which was the default for me).

To respond to Leann, this might still be the same issue Blade II was seeing, but it could be solved because perhaps Blade II stopped using Windows? If not, then this is probably a seperate issue.

Just to help other users out: The workaround for the issue I describe is to turn on wake on lan for the network card in Windows (Device manager -> Realtek NIC -> Properties -> Advanced -> Wake On Lan). The issue also seems to have been addressed upstream already [1] (though I have not tested this!). The fix I'm referring to fixes this issue specifically for the B hardware version (AFAICS), there was already support for enabling the PHY on some other hardware versions.

The fix I'm referring to is not yet present in 2.6.27, but is in 2.6.28, so at least some issues regarding the r8169 driver will disappear when Ubuntu upgrades to the .28 kernel (though perhaps the above bugfix could be backported?).

[1]: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6-stable.git;a=commit;h=a2de6b89