A flatmate wanted to replace a single powerpoint with a dual
powerpoint, and had the foolish idea that it was better to avoid an
electric shock than keep my uptime at the testosterone pumped macho
levels it had reached.  What a whimp. :)

So, with a tear in my eye, I halted my server.

Thats about where my problems started.

I have a machine that runs as an X terminal and is linked with the
server with a de21140A at each end and a crossover cable in between.
Before the reboot this link had been performing perfectly.  After the
reboot it completely sucked.

I assume therefore that the server de driver was in some state that it
could get into with an older kernel remotely, but does not now.  The
kernel on my X terminal gets updated pretty often, but I usually wait
for a good reason to update the server kernel.  The server kernel was
compiled early May (I may have overstated my uptime earlier :) whereas
the X terminal kernel was maybe a week old.

If I ping one end from the other, the replies usually turn up (some
get lost), but what sometimes happens is a big delay will
spontaneously occur, after which several replies will appear at once.
The packets aren't lost, they just take 12 seconds to get down my
100Mb full duplex link and back again.

Looking in the source changes though I see the last entry touching
this driver was:

<QUOTE>
matt
Sun Jun 21 03:32:48 PDT 1998
Update of /cvsroot/src/sys/dev/pci
In directory nb00:/home/matt/pci/src/sys/dev/pci

Modified Files:
	if_de.c 
Log Message:
Workaround problem with stalling output.  Fix later after I've moved.
</QUOTE>

So, my first question is, have you moved yet Matt? :)

Annoyingly, I retrieved an earlier version of the driver off backups
trying to roll back past any of the recent changes to if_de* that
could have caused this, but the problem is still there.  It could be
hardware of course, but that entry in the source changes and the fact
I've noticed some recent comments on current-users about currently
poor performance of de* cards.  My network is effectively unusable
though. :(

A fix, anyone?

Dave.