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Date:      Tue, 28 May 1996 19:49:10 +0300 (EET DST)
From:      "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua>
To:        questions@freebsd.org, scsi@freebsd.org
Subject:   Mysterious crashes of FreeBSD gateway -- caugh it(?)
Message-ID:  <199605281649.TAA07502@office.elvisti.kiev.ua>

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Hi people,

I got some problems, and maybe someone can comment?

A machine, our recently built firewall gateway to Internet,
is:
	ATC-1425B mainboard, PCI, SiS 496/7 chipset;
	16Mb RAM;
	AMD 5x133 CPU;
	NCR 53c810 SCSI;
	1Gb Conner CFP1060S drive (recent, good one);
	two modems on the onboard COMs (SLIP lines to the world);
	1 Ethernet card.

	OS:      FreeBSD-stable as of late March.
	Add-ons: IPfilter 3.0.3+ (by Darren Reed) as in-kernel IP filtering
		 facility, Squid 1.0beta7 WWW proxy cache daemon.

The machine was experiencing spontaneous reboots from time to time.
Either silent reboots, or prefaced with messages from NCR driver
(like "NCR dead?").

When a Compex ReadyLink (DEC 21041-based) PCI ethernet was replaced
by a random NE2000, the trouble almost gone -- the box was up for
some days, just Ok.

Today we were able to inspire a repeatable reboot with a misconfigured
test machine on the same network. It has a gateway machine as
a default router, and no route to another subnet, connected via
FreeBSD-1.1.5-based host, was in the tables.  So each packed from
the test machine, destined to those subnet, was going to gateway
first, then forwarded to 1.1.5 box, and ICMP redirect was sent to
the test box about this from the gateway.

When doing a massive TCP transfers to the 1.1.5-connected subnet,
or even ping -f, a high network load was inspired on a gateway
machine (receive a packet -- forvard it -- send redirect).
NE2000 worked fine, but NCR driver started to through messages
about I/O errors, "NCR dead", etc.  Then gateway rebooted itself.

	What I want to ask.

What might be the source of that trouble? Poor motherboard quality, when
an overloaded (?! is it an overload?) either ISA or PCI bus forces NCR
to go asleep?  Or is it a bug in TCP/IP stack or IPfilter, or
their interraction with NCR driver, tickled
with the nessesity to process IP/ICMP packets at a very high rate?

I strongly suspect a hardware problem, but maybe there are other
opinions?

-- 

	With best regards -- Andrew Stesin.

	+380 (44) 2760188	+380 (44) 2713457	+380 (44) 2713560

	"You may delegate authority, but not responsibility."
					Frank's Management Rule #1.



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