good hint:
i do also have an old dying backup hard disk (but only accessed once in a
month) with apparent soft errors which is still in use because i was to lazy
to change it.
 I'll remove it asap and see.

I believe that it could be a really odd issue if this is proven in my case.

thanks for the tip...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mirko Thiesen" <thiesi@ReLink.NetWorkXXIII.de>
To: "J.Lorec" <j.lorec@ddcr.biz>
Cc: <netbsd-help@NetBSD.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 12:03 AM
Subject: Re: pppoe connection randomly down


> On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, J.Lorec wrote:
>
> > > I once had a similar problem and wrote the following two very short
shell
> >
> > Of course this is just a quick & dirty workaround but it could help in
some
> > way. Thanks anyway.
> > Just a question: you said you had once this problem; how did you solve
this?
> > Hardware, ISP, OS (I do really like netbsd) or even phone line
migration?
>
> It was really strange: The IDE hard drive of that machine was failing.
> NetBSD complained about lost interrupts and discovered soft errors.
> Sometimes it degraded communications to that drive to PIO Mode. When the
> errors occured, everything was still working - except the Internet
> connection. The solution was to replace the bad hard drive.
>
> Until that time I had seen other strange errors in conjunction with hard
> disk errors, but nothing ever had any impact on the PPPoE link.
>
> Bye, K&K,
> T-Zee
> -- 
> thiesi@NetWork23.Sytes.NET ---- NetBSD: Power to the people!
> Tel.: ++49-(0)171-416 05 09 -- Fax: ++49-(0)171-134 16 05 09
> Mirko Thiesen, P.O. Box 26 03 54, D-13413 Berlin, W. Germany
>              "We're with you all the way, mostly"
>
>