Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:17:57 -0500 (EST) From: Marco Radzinschi <marco@radzinschi.com> To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Uptime not so good after all -- why does my net connection go dead? Message-ID: <20011213155527.E80139-100000@mail.radzinschi.com> In-Reply-To: <002201c183fd$6d028210$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Hello:
# /sbin/arp -d <IP of router>
# /sbin/ping -q -c 4 <IP of router>
This should "revive" the dead connection. If it happens a lot, put the
commands in /etc/crontab to run every five minutes.
Do drop the FreeBSD versus Windows NT rhetoric.
Marco Radzinschi
E-Mail: marco@radzinschi.com
AOL IM: CrackedBoy
Running FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE i386
3:55PM up 32 days, 24 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.02, 1.00
On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> I thought my FreeBSD system was going to stay up forever, based on what I
> had heard, but I had to boot it today. For the umpteenth time, the OS
> abruptly and silently decided to stop communicating with my router. It had
> no trouble talking to the other PC on my LAN, but it absolutely would not
> talk to the router. As far as I could tell, it would not respond to traffic
> from the router, nor would it send traffic to the router.
>
> The FreeBSD system contains a 3C905 3-Com 100 Mbps Ethernet NIC connected to
> one port of a 3Com five-port switch. The other PC, running Windows NT, is
> connected to another port on this same switch. The uplink of the switch is
> connected to one of the ports on a NetGear ADSL router.
>
> I've ruled out most potential causes:
>
> - It's not the router; the router continued to talk with the NT machine, but
> could not talk with or even ping the FreeBSD machine.
>
> - It's not the WAN; traffic from the router was ignored even for local
> purposes, such as syslog logging.
>
> - It's not the switch; I have the same problem when connecting both local
> machines directly to the router.
>
> - It's not the FreeBSD machine's NIC; the NIC continues to talk to the NT
> machine, and I can also make it work with the router by adding a new IP
> address to the interface ("ifconfig xl0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx alias").
>
> - Rebooting and/or power-cycling the router have no effect.
>
> - Power-cycling the switch (there is no reboot function) has no effect.
>
> - Taking the interface down with ifconfig up and down has no effect.
>
> Nothing seemed to make the problem go away, so after two weeks of continuous
> uptime, I finally bit the bullet and rebooted the machine. The problem was
> gone when the machine came back up. I did not power-cycle the hardware.
>
> This means that the NT machine still holds the record for uptime by a very
> handsome margin (several weeks).
>
> I'd like to know exactly what is happening inside FreeBSD when it decides to
> consign this particular IP address to the Twilight Zone for one particular
> destination/source (the router). Obviously, this is a mission-critical
> issue, as no production system can afford to be completely deprived of
> external network connectivity.
>
> I used to have this problem a lot more until I discovered that the router
> was sending out DHCP and RIP traffic to the LAN. I turned that off and the
> problem _seemed_ to go away. Unfortunately, it looks like it simply became
> less frequent instead. Once in two weeks is still completely unacceptable,
> however.
>
> The same thing happened again as I was writing this message. Obviously
> there is a problem.
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