[tulip-bug] troublesome linksys NIC

[Keith Warno]

Donald Becker wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Keith Warno wrote:
>>The box is a mail server, serving about 60 people.  It gets hammered all 
>>day, every day, and is the only box with a linksys NIC that has been 
>>having transmit timeouts time and time again.  However those Tx hung 
>>messages are a recent thing (within the past couple of weeks).
>>
> 
> When this happens, do you notice a transmit pause of more than four
> seconds?  (There should be no interruption of Rx packets, although you
> won't be able to tell that when a server can't transmit.)

Yep.  I'd say at least that long.  It's long enough for a user's mail 
client to attempt speak POP3 the the mail server and thus attempt to 
authorize, realize it can't because the box is in lala land hence 
believing that "athorization failed" and proceed to re-request the 
password.  By the time the user enters the password (again), the box is 
"back to normal".

I notice the pause more frequently than other users as I'm more often 
than not poking around in logs via an ssh connection or the like. 
Typical symptom is typing some characters that don't show up till about 
5 seconds later.

Would you recommend trying another tulip clone?  Perhaps a version 4.1?