Silence AppleYukon2

2010

If you ever checked the kernel log (/var/log/kernel.log) on your Mac, chances are that you encounter a whole lot of these messages:

Jul 10 17:26:06 nrique kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 \
sk98nif - deadmanCheck - nothing received, soft reset of chip
Jul 10 17:30:06 nrique kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 \
sk98nif  - deadmanCheck - nothing received, soft reset of chip
Jul 10 17:34:06 nrique kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 \
sk98nif - deadmanCheck - nothing received, soft reset of chip
Jul 10 17:36:06 nrique kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 \
sk98nif - deadmanCheck - still nothing received, hard reset of chip

These may occur on some ethernet connected Macs with a Marvell Yukon2 ethernet adapter. The kernel runs a watchdog that resets the driver every two minutes if nothing is received. This may cause problems with ntpd and serialnumberd (on Mac OS X Server), aside from filling your kernel log with crap.

Lots of people have been trying to find a solution for this but nothing seems to work, apart from making sure that the network card receives something within 2 minutes. Alex Rasmussen came up with a simple ping to do exactly that, and my script elaborates on that.

silence-appleyukon2 will be launched by launchd whenever the network changes. It finds out whether the network card is active and if so, pings the default gateway every minute. Disconnect the Mac and silence-appleyukon2 will stop pinging.

Usage:

Download silence-appleyukon2 or get it from github.

Unpack and install with

$ cd silence-appleyukon2-1.0
$ sudo ./install.sh

Watch /var/log/system.log for information on silence-appleyukon2.

Uninstall:

silence-appleyukon2 needs to be properly uninstalled. Deleting the files installed by this package will confuse launchd. Please use the uninstall.sh script.

$ cd silence-appleyukon2-1.0
$ sudo ./uninstall.sh

Issues

Please report any issues on github.