usb ethernet adapter not working

Question

I recently bought a usb ethernet adapter for my laptop. When I connect it to Windows 10, it treats the device as a flash drive. On this "flash drive" is an executable .exe file. Running it on Windows, everything works fine. However, on Linux (Manjaro in my case) it only sees the device as a flash drive. The internet connection not working.

inxi -nxxx shows:

Network:
Device-1 ...
Device-2: ICS Advent USB 2.0 10/100M
Ethernet Adaptor
type: USB driver: usb-storage
bus-ID: 2-4:3 chip-ID 0fe6:9702 class-ID: 0806

Can I manually force it to use the correct driver?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The USB vendor ID indicates a Kontron/ICS Advent/CoreChips product.

CoreChips has a SR9700 network adapter chip, but the product id being 0x9702 instead of 0x9700 suggests this might be a different version of the chip. Or it might be the product ID used to indicate that the device is in "USB storage" mode.

This Chromium OS bug report looks very similar to your case: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=447045

Try running this command as root:

usb_modeswitch -v 0fe6 -p 9702 -K

This tells usb_modeswitch to send a sequence of two SCSI commands to the "USB storage device": the first command is "allow media removal", the second is "eject media". This is what some mode-switching USB devices use as an indication that the Windows driver installation kit is not needed any more, and the real functionality of the device can be revealed.

Once you've done that, try the inxi -nxxx command again. Has the class-ID: 0806 part changed to something else, perhaps to class-ID: 0206 (meaning an Ethernet network device)? Has any other information changed?

The next problem could be that the sr9700 driver module will not recognize the product ID 9702, as it expects only product ID 9700. When the device switches to the actual network interface mode, it might or might not change its ID. If the product ID changes to 9700, you'll only need the usb_modeswitch part.

But if the product ID remains 9702 also after the modeswitch, you could try this:

modprobe sr9700
echo "0fe6 9702" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/sr9700/new_id

If the chips with product ID 9702 will work identically to chips with product ID 9700, this might work. But if there are differences, the driver will most likely not work correctly. You might see errors in dmesg output.

This discussion suggests this approach might not work: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/general-hardware/44256-usb-ethernet-adaptor-0fe6-9702-kontron-ics-advent?103621-USB-gt-Ethernet-adaptor-(0FE6-9702-Kontron-ICS-Advent)=

However, it refers to an earlier dm9601 driver; you might have better luck with the sr9700 driver.

If this works, then to make this configuration persistent, you would have to do two things:

• Add configuration to trigger usb_modeswitch with the appropriate options when a "USB storage" (pre-modeswitch) device with vendor ID 0fe6 and product ID 9702 appears. This might be achieved with a udev rule similar to what /lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules (or a similar file in your distro) contains, plus a configuration file named /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/0fe6:9702 with the following contents:

    # ICS Advent/CoreChips SR9700 v2 USB ethernet NIC
    StandardEject=1

Depending on what exactly happens to the USB identifiers of the device when the mode-switch is triggered, you might want to add some options here to allow usb_modeswitch to verify the switching is successfully achieved. See here for more information on configuration file parameters for usb_modeswitch.

• Add configuration to load the sr9700 network driver and feed it the new vendor/product ID pair, either pre-emptively at system start-up, or whenever the post-modeswitch device appears. This could be achieved with a /etc/modprobe.d/usb-nic-sr9702.conf file with the following contents:

    alias usb:v0FE6p9702d*dc*dsc*dp*ic*isc*ip*in* sr9700
    install sr9700 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install sr9700; /bin/echo "0fe6 9702" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/sr9700/new_id

Answer 2

This is a so-called Modeswitch device. (Because it needs a driver to switch it from being one type of USB device to another).

Check if you have the usb_modeswitch package installed. If you have, and it still doesn't work, um, Bad Luck™️, you might simply have a device for which at least usb_modeswitch has no support. And chances are that then there's also no Linux driver.

Adding modeswitch support however is often not that bad if other devices from the same vendor have support. Might not be impossible!

Answer 3

After trying lot of stuff from different www-pages I took a look at the USB-Descriptor:

The 0fe6:9702 is a multidevice. I has 2 child devices:

CDROM on Interface 0

and

USB to Ethernet Adapter on Interface 1

So you can't switch the config. You've to tell the driver to use Interface 1.

Who know how, please let us know. I'll use the rest of this weekend to try.