Skip to content

Communication Protocols — question 9 of 10

Write a real answer. It is graded against the question's rubric, and the mastery movement is computed by the same engine the product uses. Scoring here is deterministic rather than model-written, so this page costs nothing to run and nothing is saved. In a track built from your own posting, the same rubric is graded by the model, which is what produces feedback about your reasoning rather than about coverage.

A board's Ethernet link light intermittently fails to come up, but only when the board is cold (just after power-on in a cool room); once it's been running a few minutes it links reliably every time. The PHY's status register reports 'no link partner detected' during the failures. Given the PHY/MAC split and the magnetics in the signal path, walk through where you'd look first, what you'd measure, and what you'd expect to see if your hypothesis is correct.

How sure are you?

Being confidently wrong costs more mastery than admitting a guess — that is deliberate, and it is how misconceptions get found.

Neither is graded, and nothing here is recorded.