Continuing network problems with 2.1.64+

Pete Toscano (pete@psi.com)
Wed, 26 Nov 1997 19:17:21 -0500

Ever since 2.1.64 came out, I've been having problems with networking. The
machine boots up fine, loading the module for my ne2000 clone with no
problems, but, when it comes to doing anything involving real network access
(not the loop-back interface), I'm dead in the water. I can manipulate the
eth0 interface without problems. I can do a tcpdump on eth0, but all I get
are a couple repeating (and failing) ARP requests. Checking the TX and RX
counts for eth0 shows the TX errors to be increasing fairly steadily, but
occasionally, the RX dropped counter increments. The most frustrating thing
about this problem is that everything looks okay outside of the obvious
networking-related things (like NFS mounted partitions, etc). 2.1.63 and
lower versions work fine.

My machine is an Intel Pentium 133, with 40M of RAM, and a NE2000 compatible
ISA Ethernet card. I'm not quite sure how to tell what my mother-board is,
but does the "i430HX" on the screen on boot-up mean that it's a Triton HX
mo-bo? The BIOS seems to be Award (4.51G, though I think that call a lot of
versions that, don't they?). Another string that appears on boot-up is "D5CUB
NS-04". Not sure if this means anything or not.... The cable is good and
link is there.

Just to lessen the chance that it's a hardware problem, I switched Ethernet
cards and switched slots, but the same problem happened. 2.1.65 works on my
6x86 machine at home with the same Ethernet card. I don't have access to
another machine to try here, otherwise I would. Is there anything else with
the hardware that I should try?

Since the problem started with 2.1.64, I took the 2.1.64 patch and broke it up
into smaller parts. Two of these parts were the "include" file patches and
the "arch" file patches. Just applying these patches to the 2.1.63 kernel
leads to the same networking problem(s). This is the list of files:

linux/arch/i386/kernel/head.S
linux/arch/i386/kernel/setup.c
linux/arch/i386/kernel/trampoline.S
linux/arch/i386/kernel/traps.c
linux/arch/i386/mm/fault.c
linux/include/asm-i386/bugs.h
linux/include/asm-i386/system.h
linux/include/linux/head.h
linux/include/linux/miscdevice.h
linux/include/linux/ncp_fs.h
linux/include/linux/pci.h

What I'll probably do now is remove these one at a time until I find the patch
that, when removed, restores network connectivity. Doing this, though, gives
me the heebie-jeebies because I'm guessing that some of these patches are
meant to be applied together and who knows what'll happen if they're not.
I'll probably start with removing the traps.c patch....

Has anyone else had this problem? Can anyone suggest anything?

Please CC me directly on any replies -- I try to keep up with this list, but,
as I'm sure many of you know, it can be kind of tough to sometimes...

Cheers,
pete