> About once a day our netbsd network server reboots right after a device
> timeout. What I'm looking for is either a way to make the machine
> respond in a less drastic way (just reinitialising the network card with
> ifconfig down, ditto up usually helped in similar cases) or to prevent
> the device timeout alltogether.

I've seen similar behavior with the realtek driver on a cheap clone
card.  I suspect that the driver is buggy.  I bought the card by
mistake, and I haven't had the cycles to attempt to debug it, nor the
necessary documentation.

I replaced with with a netgear card (supported by the tlp driver in
-current) and it's been working much better since then.

> I would appreciate any suggestions,

If you don't feel like wading into driver gore up to your waist, find
a different model card.  I've had good results with ex* and fxp*, and
with tlp* under -current.

					- Bill