more NetGear mising ARPs

[William J. Earl]

Neale Banks writes:
 > With 2.0.36 and tulip.c:v0.89H on a not-so-slow machine (349.80 bogomips)
 > I appear to be bumping into this problem :-(
 > 
 > Originally this machine was happily working, plugged in to a NetGear
 > 10/100 "hub" (IIRC, a DS516) on a busyish network.  The machine was moved
 > to a 10Mb hub on a _quiet_ subnet and now has missing-arp problems - worse
 > with the Cisco 25xx which is the gateway on this subnet (the other linux
 > box on the subnet is OK if you first arp from that, with the Cisco it's
 > much less inclined to talk (even with attempting to talk from the Cisco)).

       This is pretty much exactly the symptoms I have been seeing:  the
NetGear card does not deliver the ARP replies to the driver, even though
they definitely are on the wire.  v0.91 (4/14/99) did not make any difference
in this problem for my card, although it did cure cases of the system hanging
with interrupts disabled (presumably in the driver).  I am running with an
2.2.9 kernel.
...
 > Turning debug up to three didn't produce anything obviously "interesting"
 > (but the first time I booted with debug=3 the arp to the Cisco worked,
 > subsequent tests suggest this may have been a fluke).

     debug=4 does not turn up anything else.  The ARP will work randomly
to "problem" hosts.  The percentage of success for various problem hosts
can vary widely; I have seen 50% and under %1 for various hosts.