mii-tool is deprecated, use ethtool
Posted by Vide on November 13, 2008
Title says it all. If you want to check (or set) your ethernet NIC configuration or status in Linux, people used to use mii-tools. But there’s a lot more powerful and modern tool that obsoletes it: ethtool
You can install it with your favourite package manager, if it’s not already present in your system.
In Debian/Ubuntu, you can issue
# aptitude install ethtool
Here it is an example:
# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 1
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x000000ff (255)
Link detected: yes
daveg said
Its probably worth mentioning that mii-tool has been deprecated in RHEL since version 3 atleast.
Vide said
Yeah, but I still see too many people using or suggesting to use mii-tool, hence this post :)
Jay said
I beat my head against mii-tool the other day for a long while before I found this post (or, it could have been some other one, but I found this one today by looking for “mii-tool deprecated). mii-tool doesn’t seem to know about gigabit connections, so even though the machine was doing gigabit, I couldn’t tell with mii-tool.
Vide said
Yep Jay, this is one of the worst limitations of mii-tool and it makes me a little sad that Debian as of Lenny still installs by default mii-tool and not ethtool