Looks like my laptop's MII is broken...

When I got home last night, I didn't get network, even though the network cable was plugged in. After fiddling around a bit, I saw that the MII gave an I/O error. Not 'no link', just EIO.

Rebooting didn't help. Nor did removing the cable. Nor did most of the other things I tried. After a few minutes, just as I was about to give up, it suddenly worked again. Did what I wanted, and afterwards, shut down the thing.

This morning, when I wanted to synchronize my mail, it didn't work again. I tried to do what I did last night again, but today nothing worked. mii-tool -R usually resulted in EIO, mii-tool never gave anything else than 'no link'. mii-tool -A <anything> was a good recipe to make it throw EIO again. mii-tool -r sometimes did not, but never worked the way it should.

I'm hoping the hub is broken, but it probably isn't. I'll find out when I get to work today...

Update: doesn't seem to be the MII; I apparently missed that one of the contacts in the RJ45 connector is a little bit bended, and it doesn't make contact any more. That's probably all.