Realtek RTL8169 Ethernet died?

[Mark Benson <md.benson%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi,

My NetBSD amd 5.1 box, a Intel D510MO motherboard with a SSD drive and 1GB of 
RAM, has been running for a while now 24/7 as a VAX emulator running SimH.

It's worked flawlessly up until today when I was ssh'd into it and suddenly the 
connection dropped. I couldn't raise it again so I rebooted it, suspecting 
something had crashed. I wasn't working on the NetBSD side and I haven't 
changed the config of the NetBSD side for a while.

Upon rebooting it still wouldn't ssh, so I hooked up a local kb/monitor. 
Locally the box is perfectly sane. I can login and even ifconfig -a lists re0 
as a configured ethernet device... except it won't ping out to my router or 
anything on the network. I can't ssh into it either despite sshd running. dmesg 
reports the card is initialised fine. I can't see what's up...

I figured it was a NetBD issue and booted from a Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS CD and that 
can't DHCP despite the dmesg reporting the card okay and the link reporting up 
when I attach a cable.

It seems the interface has died completely :(

Now I'd put this down to something like a hardware issue except this is the 
*second* time this has happened to an amd64 machine of mine running NetBSD 
(possibly 4.0 or 5.0 I don't remember). Last time it was an old i865-chipset 
motherboard that I was using a server that I'd had for years and that time I 
put it down to old hardware failing. I strongly suspect as it was an Intel 
chipset it also had a Realtek ethernet chip.

This board is less than 3 months old and was working 24/7 flawlessly with 
Ubuntu 10.04 but I swapped to NetBSD as it's a lighter weight environment with 
less clutter and it's easier to built a tap0/bridge setup than Ubuntu (which is 
very useful with SimH).

I'm lead to think this isn't a coincidence. Has anyone else got any experience 
or input?

-- 

Mark Benson

http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK

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