Date: 13 Aug 2002 16:02:09 -0400 From: Jim Frost <jimf@frostbytes.com> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Solution to rl0 and xl0 watchdog timeout problem Message-ID: <1029268930.6150.97.camel@icehouse>
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I'm sending this message in the hope that it may help someone else who runs into a similar problem. I recently purchased a new PC to use as a server. This PC was purchased from a local vendor and had an MSI motherboard. Unfortunately I can't find the documentation on which motherboard model it is, but if someone needs to know I can probably dig it up. The PC has a 1.6GHz P4 installed and 512MB memory. Networking was originally managed by a DLink DFE-530TX+ ethernet card hooked into a 10Mbps hub (yea, yea, but it still works so why mess with it). Installation went smoothly aside from having to individually check about a thousand packages to install everything on the disk. That installer is awful. When I fired it up, however, I got "rl0: watchdog timeout" errors on the console and, of course, no network traffic got through. The man page suggests that this is a bad cable or connection however the hub and card were both showing connection lights. To be certain I tried a couple of other "known good" wires. Same thing. Despite the fact that the ethercard is listed as being officially supported I figured I probably had one with incompatible firmware or something, so I went out and got a 3com 3c905 card. Swapped cards, reconfigured, rebooted and ... "xl0: watchdog timeout". That pretty much left the problem to BSD, since the system had passed burn-in on WinXP. I thought that perhaps the PC vendor had set up the PCI settings for WinXP and maybe that was not compatible with BSD, so I investigated. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but while I was there I noticed that slots 1 and 3 and slots 2 and 6 shared interrupts on this motherboard. (I have no idea how common that is.) Guessing that this might be the problem I moved the ethercard into slot 4 and ... voila, it worked. I would love to know why this failed, but regardless I at least wanted this solution to get out there so the next guy who's tearing his hair out over this problem can find the solution with google or in the archives. Cheers, jim frost jimf@frostbytes.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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