RTL8139 receive problem

[Alexander Dietrich]

Hello,

I have a nasty problem with an 8139A-based card by Level One, perhaps
someone can tell me how to find out more and how to fix it:
The card is running under kernel 2.2.14 and RedHat 6.0, board chipset
is VIA MVP4. The other computer has a card of exactly the same model
and both are connected by a 100 Mbit hub. Let's call the faulty box
A and the good box B.

The problem: when transfering large files to A it stops responding
after a couple of megabytes. It is not even possible to ping between
the computers anymore, local traffic is not affected though.
I don't receive any messages in /var/log/messages or elsewhere.

When pinging from A, tcpdump shows echo_request AND echo_reply
being sent initially, without ping getting any of it.
Later on "arp request"s are being sent and after a while ping
reports "Destination host unreachable".
When pinging from B I can only see echo_requests, no echo_reply.

I can get the card working again by taking the interface down and up
with the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network script.
I tried driver versions 1.07, 1.08 and 1.08a and also changed the PCI
slot the card is in, nothing helped.
When I use a 10 Mbit hub to connect the cards the problem does not
occur, because the load is smaller I guess. Also, when copying the same
files to box B I also don't have any problems, although it uses the
same card.

Does anyone have an idea what other things I could try ? This problem
practically renders box A unusable, which is pretty annoying.

Thanks,
Alexander Dietrich
-- 
| Alexander Dietrich | Norderstedt, Germany |
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