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To: Dave Andersen <angio@aros.net>
cc: taob@io.org (Brian Tao), root@edmweb.com, isp@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Computer disappears from the network, then reappears...? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 09 Jun 1996 14:42:48 MDT."
             <199606092042.OAA11101@terra.aros.net> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 1996 18:16:11 -0700
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>Lo and behold, Brian Tao once said:
>
>>     Yup... many times under 2.1.0R and only once so far with
>> 2.2-960501.
>
>  Here's another once under -stable.
>
>> > The machine is a 16-meg Pentium 100 with Asus Triton motherboard and
>> > SCSI-II hard drive on an Adaptec 2940. The ethernet card is an SMC
>> > EtherPower 10/100 in 10 mbps (standard ethernet) mode.
>> 
>>     The odd thing here is that only one machine here (that I know of)
>> exhibits this behaviour.  It is a 486DX4/100, ASUS P/I-486SP3G
>> motherboard with 32MB RAM and the same EtherPower card, running at 10 Mbps.
>> We have a dozen other P133 servers with the same model of SMC's and
>
>   The machine of ours that hung is a P100, triton, 2 adaptec 2940s, and 
>an Intel EtherExpress 10/100 running at 10Mbps.
>
>    I think I smell a common feature -- we're all using the fxp0 driver.  
>This server never exhibited this before I dropped in the EtherExpress.  
>Are there any known bugs in the driver?  (I would assume not).

   There aren't any known bugs in the driver, but the 82557 chip (the NIC) has
a bug that causes it to "go away" when it sees any garbage data. There is a
"work around" that basically amounts to resetting the chip if you don't see
any traffic in <n> seconds. I think this is pretty disgusting, however, so I
didn't implement it. The newer revision chips are supposed to have this
problem fixed.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project