Subject: Re: Ethernet receiver goes catatonic
To: Mike Cheponis <mac@Wireless.Com>
From: David Burgess <burgess@mitre.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 06/06/2001 08:56:54
I'm not sure if it's related, but I have one of these cards in my NFS
server, and every once in a while I will get a "Out of buffers" error (I
don't have the exact error message, one of my techs cleared it when he
rebooted).  After that, the card is catatonic and the system (and all of
the systems that connect to it) need to be rebooted.

The similarities are:
1)  They are both rtk cards
2)  It only happens when lots of file activity is occurring.

Dave

Mike Cheponis wrote:
> 
> Hi, I'm running 1.5T on a K6-2/350 w/128MB.
> 
> With a RealTEk RTL8139A chip, using the rtk0 driver, and FTPing into the
> box from another machine on a 100 Mb/s LAN causes the interface to stop
> receiving; I'm sending lots of big files at this machine.
> 
> If I do:  ifconfig rtk0 down   then   ifconfig rtk0 up    then it comes back
> to life, and I can use the network again. (The previous ftp session is
> hosed, however).
> 
> It only seems to be affected when there are lots of big files going into
> this machine; just an ssh session or so never causes a problem.
> 
> Today, I was able to try a D-Link DFE-570TX card (4-ports, tulip chips) uses
> the de driver.
> 
> This time, the FTP succeeded for about 10% of the files before having the
> exact same problem as the rtk0  (the rtk0 only got about 0.1% of the files
> before croaking).
> 
> Has anybody seen this before?
> 
> Thanks -Mike
> 
> p.s. FWIW, the machine sending to the NetBSD box is Windows 2k, using ftp
> in a command window, with "MPUT *" in binary mode.  I did try a NetBSD 1.5
> box as the source and got a similar result, however.