Netatalk/Appletalk Problems with eepro100

[Simon Andrew Boggis]

Hi,

I thought it might be useful to run this subject past this list as well as 
the netatalk one.

I have been trying to set up appletalk routing only (no file serving) on a
linux router box which is equipped with 3 dual port eepro100+ (82558B) 
cards. The system is linux 2.2.6/glibc 2.1.1 (Debian Potato), however I am
using the 1.07 eepro100 drivers (rather than 1.06, as shipped with the 2.2.6
kernel). I have been attempting to bridge appletalk between our main network on
eth0 and a private subnet on eth3.

Curious things happen when the appletalk module is installed - 
one gets lots of:

Apr 20 18:34:34 MACHINE kernel: protocol 9b80 is buggy, dev eth0 
Apr 20 18:35:20 MACHINE kernel: protocol 0008 is buggy, dev eth0 
Apr 20 18:38:21 MACHINE kernel: protocol 0400 is buggy, dev eth0 
Apr 20 18:40:14 MACHINE kernel: protocol 3781 is buggy, dev eth0 

in /var/log/debug if you tcpdump eth0.

When netatalk (atalkd only) gets fired up, appletalk connections hang quite 
quickly, accompanied by messages in /var/log/messages:

Apr 15 17:52:36 MACHINE kernel: eth3: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0000 at 17015/17030 command 00000000. 
Apr 15 17:52:36 MACHINE kernel: eth3: Trying to restart the transmitter... 

There has been a lot of discussion on the netatalk-admins list concerning this,
which I have been following, and the conclusion there was that the hardware
was broken, but could be worked around by setting multicast_filter_limit=3.
I have no idea why '3' particularly, however in my case I found the solution:

(a) didn't work (macs still hang after a minute or so) (:
(b) stopped mrouted from working on the machine

and therefore wasn't much of a solution at all for me.

Having consulted a colleague, I was assured that appletalk works fine on pc
hardware with eepro100's using Novell Netware. I therefore was suspicious of
the diagnosis of a hardware fault in the eepro100 offered above.	

In order to isolate software from hardware, I tried the much older Univeral
Appltalk Router (UAR 1.0.16 September 1995) which doesn't use the appletalk 
support in the linux kernel. This works absolutely fine. This leads me to 
believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the hardware and eepro100 driver are fine, 
but that either netatalk and/or kernel appletalk support is broken. 

Has anyone else been having trouble with appletalk on the eepro100? More 
importantly, does anyone have a view on whether my above analysis is correct
(i.e. the hardware and driver are OK).

Simon


Simon A. Boggis 					Systems Programmer
Department of Computer Science, 
Queen Mary and Westfield College London, E1 4NS, UK. Telephone 0171 975 5234