I had the system completely stop talking through the 3Com interface last
night. I had to come in to work and reboot the system to get it talking
to the network again. When I got here, I noticed that the light on that
port on my hub was even out. I remember way back I used to have this
kind of trouble with older 3c590 cards and the old 3c59x.c driver, and
the trick then was to ifconfig eth0 down then ifconfig eth0 up, so I
tried that last night - no luck. I had to reboot the system to get the
network interface back up.
I don't think this is a cable/hub or driver issue, since 2.0.36 talks
through the same interface just fine (zero lost packets). But if I use
the driver from 2.0.36 in 2.2.5, I get the pauses (and eventual hang).
What could be causing this?
Once upon a time, Chris Adams <cadams@ro.com> said:
>I have a Compaq Proliant news server (PPro 200, 320 MB RAM, DPT
>SmartRAID IV SCSI). It has 2 ethernet interfaces: the built-in TI TLAN
>(eth1) and a 3Com 3c905 (eth0), both running at 10Mb/s. The news feeds
>come in through eth1 and the readers use eth0.
>
>I decided to try a 2.2 kernel because under 2.0.3[4-6], I get sporadic
>crashes in ip_rt_expire after an uptime between a few hours and a week.
>This is a mostly Red Hat 4.2 machine, but I upgraded the necessary
>packages according to Documentation/Changes.
>
>I tried 2.2.5 and 2.2.5-ac6, and I don't get the crashes, but the 3Com
>network interface experiences pauses where I don't get any packets
>through it for 1-10 seconds (I get 8-30% packet loss when I run ping for
>a while). Thinking that maybe the 3Com driver in 2.2.5 was the problem,
>I recompiled with the 3Com driver from 2.0.36, but I still see the same
>problem.
>
>It only seems to do this when the system is under a load - if INN isn't
>running, it doesn't seem to happen. The TI interface doesn't seem to
>have this problem (if I run a ping on the news server to a device out
>the TI interface I don't see any packets lost).
>
>I say it seems to happen under load, but it doesn't happen at the moment
>the server is busy. If I run "vmstat 1" for a while, the pauses are NOT
>when the system is most busy. I als compiled in the patch included with
>sard and ran it with a 1 second update, and the pauses aren't when the
>disk is most busy either.
>
>But if INN isn't running (and taking up a lot of RAM and using a lot of
>disk I/O), I don't see the pauses.
>
>Has anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions? If there is any
>more info I can provide, please let me know.
-- Chris Adams <cadams@ro.com> - System Administrator Renaissance Internet Services - IBS Interactive, Inc. Home: http://ro.com/~cadams - Public key: http://ro.com/~cadams/pubkey.txt I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/