ethernet problem with 2.6.8 [SOLVED]

brab · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

Hi,

As my ethernet connexion did not seem so good,
[EDIT: the problem comes from the receive buffer auto-tuning. See
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-August/msg01483.html
for a solution]

I decided to check whether my mtu settings were fine. Imagine my surprise when I saw:

charm ~ # ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr *** inet addr:*** Bcast:*** Mask:***
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:11

Even though I am using it, there is no traffic reported for eth0. This seems a bit strange.

I am running gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.8-r3, and my ethernet card is a "Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet" using the tg3 kernel driver.

Any idea as to what may be wrong here?

Cuardin · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 11:56 am Post subject:

But it does work?
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lwithers · Guru Joined: 31 Dec 2003 Posts: 300 Location: Reading, UK

Yeah, my network devices also report that, even though the network is up and running fine. I'm not sure why, but since it doesn't affect anything, I'm not bothered by it.

As to your network running "not so good", could you describe the problems you are having so that we can help?

brab · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

The not so good network means the following:
- it took me four tries this morning to "emerge sync", most of the time the download would stop in the middle, and after a while trigger a timeout
- some web pages sometimes get stuck when loading. It's hard to reproduce (a reload often helps things).

I'm not sure this is a problem of the adapter or of our network. I ran some small tests, and it seems that I can easily send and receive data within the internal network, so I guess some router must be the cause of the issue somewhere between our net and the rest of the world.

The "ifconfig" thing is the reason that I thought this might be hardware of driver related. But if other people also see this ifconfig weirdness, I think it dismisses it.

In any case, the network is "good enough" to let me send this :lol:

Thanks for the help offer and the replies. I guess I'll just go home to surf now

Cuardin · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 1:36 pm Post subject:

What you can attempt to do is to set your comp to ping something on your internal network at a very high rate and keep it going for several hours. IF those problems you describe are due to your network card then you will suffer packetloss and when ping exits it will tell you so.
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brab · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

Thanks, I'll try that. And thanks for adopting my unadopted post

Cuardin · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 7:41 pm Post subject:

"To strive, sto seek, to serve"
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brab · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

I have discovered that my network issues disappeared when I switched back to 2.6.7. Then I read the following post about this:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-August/msg01483.html

It seems that this problem is related to receive buffer auto-tuning. I'll try the systcl they suggest and will let you know if it solves the issue.

brab · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

I confirm that following the advice provided in the previous link (modifying sysctl.conf) solves everything.

Cuardin · Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2004 12:37 pm Post subject:

In that case, edit the original post in the thread and add a [solved] to the title.
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