[lug] Network interface hang prob

[John Karns]

My system was up for some 21 days when I experienced a lockup somewhere in
the network device layer I presume.  It happened when I tried to initiate
an ftp session with another machine on the LAN.  The ppp interface was not
up at the time.  

I couldn't ping from the machine nor would it acknowledge pings from other
machines.  I tried unloading the NIC module ('3c59x' - i.e. Etherlink III
card, 3Com 3c905C PCI 10/100), and all network related modules.  Also
tried running the /sbin/init.d/network script with the "stop" param, then
a "start".  None of this corrected the problem, and I finally aquiesced to
reboot the machine.  (I forgot to try going to single user mode, but in
similar situations in the past, this hasn't helped either.)  This machine
hasn't been around more than about 3 months, and this was the first
ocurrence.

Does anybody know if there is a particular problem of this nature with
this card?  Might there be some method of recovering from this kind of
situation (to avoid re-initialization of the entire system) of which I'm
unaware?

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John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net
Bogota, Colombia                                  Voice: 57-1-341-0300