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Date:      Thu, 6 Jul 2006 10:54:40 +0200
From:      Hank Hampel <lists@niamodnikufesin.de>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 5.5-stable network interface rl0 stops working
Message-ID:  <20060706085440.GA1654@warning.this.domain.does.not-exist.de>
In-Reply-To: <20060705174900.GA36025@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
References:  <20060705164058.GA5194@warning.this.domain.does.not-exist.de> <20060705174900.GA36025@slackbox.xs4all.nl>

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Hi Roland,

On (060705), Roland Smith wrote:
> > couple of weeks - the network interface rl0 (which is the main
> > interface on the maschine, rl1 is for backups/internal use only) stops
> Are they physically on the motherboard? Or on PCI cards? In the latter
> case try reseating the card in the slot.

fortunately they are PCI cards, so I'll check the seating.

> Try switching rl0 and rl1, and see if te problem persists. Also,
> swapping out the ethernet cable is worth trying.

Switching/exchanging the cards was an option we haven't tried yet
although it came to my mind earlier - for sure the strangest problems
are hardware related so I'll give this a try and report back.

Swapping out the ethernet cable was one of the first things I checked
but to no avail. But I'm not really sure if the switch isn't part of
the problem (although all other ports function correctly) so I'll
change the switch port to.

> Another thing to check is if rl0 is sharing an interrupt with another
> device. That can cause problems.

No there is no interupt sharing for this device but thanks for this
hint, I hadn't checked it yet.

> > When rl0 stops working ipfw loggs lots of denied packets so that it
> > seems that the dynamic (keep-state) rules don't work any longer. We
> Does the problem persist without ipfw? I've got an rl0 card on my
> workstation (6.1-STABLE, amd64, using PF without problems)

Unfortunately I can't check this because we use ipfw to generate
traffic statistics for the jails. But when the interface stops working
it has no impact to disable the firewall, short of that no log messages
are generated any longer.

> > After the stop on the interface occurs there is no other way to get
> > the interface up and running again than rebooting the whole machine.
> > Restarting /etc/rc.d/netif, the jails or ipfw doesn't help anything.
> What does ifconfig say after the interface stops working?

When the interface stops working ifconfig seems "to think" everything
is still ok. There is no hint in the output of ifconfig that the
interface is not working and ifconfig down/up doesn't help any.

> Anything in the logs, except the denied packets?

No strange enough there is no other hint in the logs that the system
is not working. At first I thought it was kind of an ipfw problem
because packets seem to arrive on the host but the responses get
blocked by ipfw. I'll check with tcpdump the next time it happens if
it's true that packets still arrive on the system.

On the other hand if ipfw is part of the problem (especially the
dynamic rules) then flushing ipfw should help I think - but it
doesn't. So maybe it's an hardware issue, I'll definitly check this
and report back. Thanks for the hints and tips!


Best regards, Hank

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