[lug] Networking question ...

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 05:25:28PM -0700, Trever C. Trader wrote:
> What's the status of the interface on the router? 
> Is it still Up/Up when you lose connectivity?
> 


Hard to tell, that's part of the problem. The box
in question is the firewall/gateway of a public
school in the north-west of austria - the thing
is administered by the local english teacher.
The CISCO is owned by the austrian telecom, a company
not commonly known for competence and speed ;-)
(And you guys complain about QWorst ...)


The more interesting bits: The whole setup
i worked fine until the school switched provider
and the kernel was recompiled (2.0.38), unfortunately
both on the same day (which makes linking the incidents
to one or the other much harder).
There's a webserver attached to the same hub (oh, i forgot
to mention, there's a hub between CISCO and gateway), so
in fact two boxes are set up in parallel. The webserver
works fine al the time and can be reached during downtime
of the gateway. It's not possible to reach the gateway
from the webserver, even so they are on the same bus.
Hence the fibre optic cable seems to be ok, it could
be either a bad hub port (but why would it work after
reboot) or a bad nic (SMC 9432 TX (rev 8) again, why would
it work after reboot) or ??? I suspect that something upsets
the card/driver: from the little info i have it looks like
the external interface has a lot of dropped packages when
in the state of autism. 


> I don't know what that loop statement would be unless for some reason
> someone is looping that interface.

This is what triggered my curiosity.

 Ralf