From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 13 13:16:51 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.radzinschi.com (cc222717-a.owml1.md.home.com [65.8.33.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8CD9E37B419 for ; Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:16:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (marco@localhost.radzinschi.com [127.0.0.1]) by mail.radzinschi.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id fBDLHvp80223; Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:17:57 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from marco@radzinschi.com) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:17:57 -0500 (EST) From: Marco Radzinschi To: Anthony Atkielski Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Uptime not so good after all -- why does my net connection go dead? In-Reply-To: <002201c183fd$6d028210$0a00000a@atkielski.com> Message-ID: <20011213155527.E80139-100000@mail.radzinschi.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello: # /sbin/arp -d # /sbin/ping -q -c 4 This should "revive" the dead connection. If it happens a lot, put the commands in /etc/crontab to run every five minutes. Do drop the FreeBSD versus Windows NT rhetoric. Marco Radzinschi E-Mail: marco@radzinschi.com AOL IM: CrackedBoy Running FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE i386 3:55PM up 32 days, 24 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.02, 1.00 On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > I thought my FreeBSD system was going to stay up forever, based on what I > had heard, but I had to boot it today. For the umpteenth time, the OS > abruptly and silently decided to stop communicating with my router. It had > no trouble talking to the other PC on my LAN, but it absolutely would not > talk to the router. As far as I could tell, it would not respond to traffic > from the router, nor would it send traffic to the router. > > The FreeBSD system contains a 3C905 3-Com 100 Mbps Ethernet NIC connected to > one port of a 3Com five-port switch. The other PC, running Windows NT, is > connected to another port on this same switch. The uplink of the switch is > connected to one of the ports on a NetGear ADSL router. > > I've ruled out most potential causes: > > - It's not the router; the router continued to talk with the NT machine, but > could not talk with or even ping the FreeBSD machine. > > - It's not the WAN; traffic from the router was ignored even for local > purposes, such as syslog logging. > > - It's not the switch; I have the same problem when connecting both local > machines directly to the router. > > - It's not the FreeBSD machine's NIC; the NIC continues to talk to the NT > machine, and I can also make it work with the router by adding a new IP > address to the interface ("ifconfig xl0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx alias"). > > - Rebooting and/or power-cycling the router have no effect. > > - Power-cycling the switch (there is no reboot function) has no effect. > > - Taking the interface down with ifconfig up and down has no effect. > > Nothing seemed to make the problem go away, so after two weeks of continuous > uptime, I finally bit the bullet and rebooted the machine. The problem was > gone when the machine came back up. I did not power-cycle the hardware. > > This means that the NT machine still holds the record for uptime by a very > handsome margin (several weeks). > > I'd like to know exactly what is happening inside FreeBSD when it decides to > consign this particular IP address to the Twilight Zone for one particular > destination/source (the router). Obviously, this is a mission-critical > issue, as no production system can afford to be completely deprived of > external network connectivity. > > I used to have this problem a lot more until I discovered that the router > was sending out DHCP and RIP traffic to the LAN. I turned that off and the > problem _seemed_ to go away. Unfortunately, it looks like it simply became > less frequent instead. Once in two weeks is still completely unacceptable, > however. > > The same thing happened again as I was writing this message. Obviously > there is a problem. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message