[lug] Networking question ...

[D. Stimits]

rm at mamma.varadinet.de wrote:
> 
> 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 ...)

This implies that one day the two companies will merge.

> 
> 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 are some ARP options in kernel compile. It is VERY useful if each
kernel that is installed and works has an archive storage of its config
for comparisons.

> 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.

Once it fails, is the machine examined closely to see if ALL other
hardware is functioning correctly? It's rather unlikely, but there is a
minor possibility that there is a resource conflict that only shows up
once in a great while.

> 
> > 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
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