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Date:      Sun, 17 Mar 2002 11:24:33 -0500
From:      Brendan McAlpine <bmcalpine@macconnect.com>
To:        Patrick O'Reilly <peri@perimeter.co.za>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: HELP!!  problem with new bsd mail server [solved kind of]
Message-ID:  <B8BA2D71.B89A%bmcalpine@macconnect.com>
In-Reply-To: <00f801c1cd28$8a198a00$0200000a@perimeter.co.za>

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Thanks Patrick.  Sorry for the lack of info.

At this point, all I want is for the machine to run a full 24 hours without
going deaf to network connections.

Its very strange.  The machine is running FreeBSD4.5 and I'm running qmail,
qmailadmin, and sqwebmail.  Apache is serving up the qmailadmin and
sqwebmail cgi's.

The machine is a brand new, dual 1GHZ pentium running RAID 5 across 3 large
SCSI disks.

Every 3 or 4 hours the machine goes "deaf" to its network set up and no
incoming or outbound traffic can get through.  When it goes deaf it can't
even ping the switch its connected to.

At first I thought the problem was because of the dual ethernet cards.  So =
I
disabled one of them in the bios settings.  The machine ran better.  After
24 hours or so, it started going deaf every 4 or 5 hours again.

Since this is happening on a more or less random schedule, I can't pin down
what the problem is.  Something is causing the machine to less its
networking ability for about 10 minutes at a time every 4 or 5 hours.

BTW, I checked my log files and nothing is being logged as errors when the
downtime occurs.  The only errors in there are:

/kernel: stray irq 7

I'm unsure of how to move from here....please help.....

TIA

Brendan

How should I go about trying to figure out what is caus

> From: "Patrick O'Reilly" <peri@perimeter.co.za>
> Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 22:24:11 +0200
> To: "Brendan McAlpine" <bmcalpine@macconnect.com>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG=
>
> Subject: Re: HELP!!  problem with new bsd mail server [solved kind of]
>=20
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Brendan McAlpine" <bmcalpine@macconnect.com>
>>=20
>> Hey everyone,
>>=20
>> I solved the immediate problem but I still need a long term solution.
>> Basically I disabled the second ethernet card and everything looks good
>> right now.  I am still looking for a better way to do this though.
>> Optimally I would like the second card to be ready to go if the first
> one
>> fails.  I guess going into bios and enabling the card isn=B9t such a big
> deal,
>> but I would like a more seamless way.
>>=20
>=20
> Brendan,
>=20
> You have not given much info in your posts (hence the stony silence :), s=
o
> I'm going to read between the lines a little.
>=20
> I'm guessing you have the two network cards configured on the same
> network, because you talk about redundancy and possibly using the same IP
> for both cards.  I think this is where your problem lies.
>=20
> Unless you use some specialised software and a switch that supports it,
> you cannot have both cards on the same IP address (AFAIK!).  Furthermore,
> having them both on the same network subnet will lead to problems with
> routing of outbound traffic from the box.
>=20
> For the moment I think you will have to keep one card off until someone
> wiser than me can suggest software which will enable what you are after.
>=20
> The manual alternative is to write a script to configure and "up" the
> second interface if the first should die.  You could even add a status
> check (ping another IP on the subnet that should always be up), and let
> this run every minute in cron to "automate" the changeover.  It's crude
> but might help you in the mean time.
>=20
> Regards,
> Patrick O'Reilly.
>=20
>=20
>=20
>=20


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