receive errors

[Eric Ding]

hi all,

i've been getting mysteriously inconsistent behavior on my cable modem
connection in the last month, with the tulip 0.90q driver and linux 2.0.36
kernel.  both cards in my router are linksys cards:

Found Lite-On 82c168 PNIC at PCI I/O address 0xe800.
eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xe800, 00:A0:CC:22:F9:C0, IRQ 11.
eth0:  MII transceiver #1 config 3100 status 782d advertising 01e1.
Found Lite-On 82c168 PNIC at PCI I/O address 0xe400.
eth1: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xe400, 00:A0:CC:23:09:71, IRQ 10.
eth1:  MII transceiver #1 config 3100 status 782d advertising 01e1.

and very often, I'm getting a nice 150+ kB/s download rate.  Every now and
then, though, things get really slow (2.5 kB/s), and only improve again
(sometimes) when I power cycle my router.  When things go bad, the RX
"errors" and "frame" count on my "outside-world" card go up very quickly.
Setting the driver debug flag to 3, I see in my dmesg:

eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05928302.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05818306.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05938302.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05788302.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 057e8306.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05a48302.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 05698302.
eth1: Receive error, Rx status 057c8306.

and so on.  So can anyone tell me if is this probably most likely related
to:

1) my old 486 motherboard,
2) my linksys wanna-be tulip chip, or
3) my cable modem?

thanks,
eric