[realtek] Ping doesn't respond anymore after 5 good tests

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Alain SMEDTS wrote:

> After a reboot of Slackware 7.1 (Kernel 2.2.16),  ping finds other hosts
> for about 5 times, then ping doesn't respond anymore. 

What does the error count report?  Five good packets, and then all
subsequent packets are bad?

> I used rtl8139.o delivered with Slackware, it is version 1.07. I upgraded
> to RTL8139 v1.12, but the problem is the same. I tried three different NIC
> (all using RTL8139) from two different brands (Accton Cheetah and Planet
> ENW-9500). Those NIC work fine in another Linux box with the same
> drivers. 

The points to a hardware problem, perhaps a PCI bus issue.  And it's
exactly the sort of problem that is difficult to work on: as you
experienced, the same driver and card works just fine with another system.

Is the broken system a 486?  (486 systems typically have PCI burst bugs.)

Try running the driver with debug=7
The output will be very verbose, but you might be able to spot a relavent
error message.

> The machine that causes problems is a Compaq Prosignia 300 with built-in
> NIC (pcnet32.o working without any problem!) 

It could possibly be corrupted packets from that machine, but that could be
easily checked by bringing the rtl8139 interface down and back up.


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
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