[linux-tr] more madge woes

[Greg Bohling <nelot01@nol.org>]

Turns out that I am still having trouble with my box falling off the
ring.

After compliling a pretty basic, clean 2.0.34 kernel it seemed like
I had stopped having the problem where my machine would suddenly
not communicate over the ring.  In fact, I had it up for over 2 weeks
(previous long had been a couple days) serving web traffic, and
printing files to a networked printer with no problems.  I thought
I'd licked the problem, but today while working from a remote X
terminal (Novell's LAN Workplace Pro for win95) the session stopped
responding.  Upon investigation, my little problem had cropped up
again.

When it happens, I cannot ping to or from the linux box (using
ip addresses; we're not running DNS).  ifconfig shows UP BROADCAST
RUNNING (I wonder about broadcast...) MTU:2000 Metric:1
with a number of packets sent and received and no packet errors.

If I down the interface and bring it back up, I get 'network
unreachable' from ping.  If I down the interface, rmmod the mtok
module, and then re-insert it, it does not detect or open the adapter
like it does on boot.  Bringing the interface back up still results
in 'network unreachable.'

The only way I can get back on the ring is to reboot the machine.

Does anyone have any kind of suggestions for where to look or what
to adjust to fix this thing?  It pretty much makes the machine
unusable for any sort of real work if the network goes down at
random times and you have to reboot to bring it back up.  I'm
perplexed by the fact that ifconfig seems to think everything is
normal even though the network no longer works.  In fact, I'm
perplexed because *nothing* seems to look abnormal other than the
fact that the network doesn't work :)

Any help would be greatly appreciated
-greg