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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!newsserver.jvnc.net!yale.edu!yale!gumby!destroyer!news.itd.umich.edu!stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu!pauls From: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu (Paul Southworth) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Subject: NetBSD + 3com503 (8-bit) = death Date: 18 May 1993 21:18:38 GMT Organization: University of Michigan ITD Consulting and Support Services Lines: 38 Distribution: world Message-ID: <1tbjre$pqg@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu So I finally sorted out my network problems. As a person who is responsible for maintaining a big ugly over-grown LAN, I have a big supply of ethernet cards to play with. As you may recall (or not) some of my previous posts regarded network death during ftp sessions from my NetBSD 0.8 (full-install) system to wherever. This is what I found: 1. Generally the second retrieval of a file via ftp to my system would make the machine hang. If I was doing it at console, there would be no way to break out of it. If I was connected with a telnet session, the session would die but I could go login at console. At console I would see messages like "acksend: sendto: no buffers available" and "inappropriate ioctl for device" with "no job control for this shell" when I logged in as root. These could not be reproduced with absolute success, but it happened more than ten times and always while doing the same thing. 2. On examining the file that failed to transfer, it would always transfer a piece of it, and size would always be a multiple of 1024 bytes, most frequently 4096. Very suspicious. I also noted that after the network death, if I ifconfig'd the interface again, it came back to life, just as good as rebooting. 3. I swapped the 3com503 (8-bit, BNC/thinnet) for another one, configured identically, according to the docs (and both of these cards performed flawlessly with 386BSD 0.1 from the time it was released through three or four different patched kernels). Problem persisted. 4. Finally I decided, after reviewing my configurations carefully, that there might be something wrong with the driver. So I dropped in a Novell NE2000 (16-bit, BNC/thinnet-configured) and did: "mv /etc/hostname.ec0 /etc/hostname.ne0 ; sync ; shutdown -r now" (ie, absolutely no changes to configuration other than the card swap) and now have had no failures for 48 hours, whereas previously I was killing the net more than once a day on average. I went nuts with ftp sessions today and could not crash it. Go figure.