On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 02:34:02PM -0400, Lars Friend wrote:
> Hello all,
>         I've been experiencing a very strange mode of failure which has me
> scratching my head so I figured I'd ask here to see if anybody had seen
> something like this before.
> 
>         I have installed NetBSD 3.1 on a brand new Dell PowerEdge 860
> system (dual core P4 Xeon, 4GB ram, 2 SATA drives in software RAID using
> raidframe raid1).
> 
>         This system is in line to (once stable) replace an aging and slow 
>         box
> to take over POP, SMTP, DHCP, and secure login services for a decent
> sized pool of users.  I cloned the old system from backups (using restore),
> put the GENERIC.MP kernel in place, and changed its hostname and IP.
> I also turned of dhcpd (so as not to stomp the live server), and let 
> it run for a few
> weeks (logging in and using it from time to time, testing out patches and
> doing general system stuff).  It was rock solid and very stable.
> 
>         So, we replaced the old system with our fancy new one, and four 
>         hours
> into operation, things get weird.  The system is still running, 
> everything seems okay,
> nothing unexpected or unpleasant in syslog, but the NIC is kaput.  It 
> sees link, seems to be
> okay, but it won't accept or make connections, pings, or any other 
> network traffic.
> [..]

maybe nmbcluster is too low ? look at netstat -m/vmstat -m when
this happens. You can also try to rebuild a kernel with
options NMBCLUSTERS=8192
and see how it goes. You may also want to try a netbsd-3 kernel, there
has been one pullup to if_bge.c since netbsd-3-1-RELEASE

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--