[Wylug-help] Linux broadband woes!

[James Holden (Wylug)]

John Hodrien wrote:

>On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, James Holden wrote:
>
>
>
>>I may be some kind of driver problem with the NIC. I had a sound card like
>>this at one time. You had to let Windows initialise it first, then it would
>>work in Linux if you did a warm-reboot. I think it may have been a case of
>>Windows dropping some firmware into it, or something. In this case, it may
>>be something to do with buffers or something like that.
>>
>>What kind of network card is it? Chipset name if possible.
>>
>>
>
>Now I still don't buy this (although another good suggestion).  There's no NIC
>problem, since you can talk IP with the router, just not route over it.
>There can't be any IP layer problem with the driver.
>
>Now with sound cards that was a common issue, because the hardware needed to
>be poked into a specific emulation mode (Microsoft Sound System, or Sound
>Blaster Compat. typically), which held over a soft reboot, but the linux
>drivers couldn't do.
>
>I just don't see how that can apply when we have functional networking as far
>as the router.  This is a real weirdo.
>
Yeah, it is a strange one. I have seen stranger things though. I once
managed a Compaq Netware 5.1 box, with an Intel Pro/100 card, connected
to a 3Com Switch. All very bog-standard. IP worked fine, but once you
had pushed about 2-3GB of IPX traffic through it, it'd slow to a crawl.
IP was always unaffected though. If you power-cycled the *switch* (not
the server) it cleared the problem. I never did get to the bottom of it.
After I left that particular place, they bought a plug-in timer to
reboot the switch overnight!

Back to this problem though... obviously something is persisting over
the reboot, so it seems to me most likely that it's to do with the state
that XP leaves the card in.

Is the broadband router the type which has a built-in hub/switch, or is
there a separate hub/switch? Maybe it's something to do with
autonegotiation if it's connected straight to the router.

OT again, I once came across a firmware bug with an HP token ring
switch/router chassis. Under high network load, it would randomly drop
packets from specific IP addresses. It would "target" three or four IP
addresses for a couple of hours, then pick some different ones. Bizarre.
So stranger things have happenned that we've got going on here.

Anyway, my first thought would be to set the machine with a static
address, first the same as, and then different to the one DHCP assigns
it, then maybe change the NIC for a different one.

Sorry for just rambling about other weird network things I've seen,
rather than coming up with anything more useful. Just trying to
illustrate that things sometimes just don't work quite like you expect
them to do.



James