8139, spontaneous network disappearance

[sharkey@superk.physics.sunysb.edu]

Ok, this might be slightly off topic...  Occasionally, from time to time,
my 8139 based ethernet cards seem to forget that there actually is a network
connected to them.  I've seen reports of other people with the same
problem.  I've tried to figure out what the problem is, but never been able
to track it down.

Now, it seems that if one does an "ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 up",
it's enough of a blow to the card to cure its amnesia.

But the thing is, on a system which has /var/spool/mail mounted over NFS,
and no root shells open at the time, this seems to be an impossible task,
because the shell checks for mail before accepting commands, but the NFS
server won't respond because the network is down, but you can't get a shell
to fix the network because you have to check for mail first.

Is there some way out of this paradox?  I tried setting root's .bash_profile
to not check mail, but it seems to check mail before reading the profile,
so local settings have no effect.

What is the recommended way for setting up a system which is to have the mail
spool directory managed by another host, yet still allow root logins when that
host is, for whatever reason, not responding?

Eric
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