Sorry to hassle about this but I've really been struggling with this. Does
anyone have any ideas aside from replacing the nics with different models?
Reliability is quite an important issue, and unfortunately so is supply as
there is not a huge range of options here in South Africa.

Any ideas would be *much* appreciated,
 Stuart


===============

I have had a few issues with the Realtek 8139 cards I am using, and I am not
sure whether it is a hardware or driver problem. My setup is as follows :

I have 3 i386 machines running NetBSD 1.5.1 and they are all sitting on the
same hub.

        ------------------------
        |   ftp    |           |
        A <------> B           C
       38.1       38.2       38.4

If I do a large (500meg+) ftp from A to B, while at the same time doing an
ftp from B to A, everything is happy. (each machine can ping every other
one)

        ------------------------
        |          |           |
        A -------> B ------->  C
            ftp        ftp

However, if I am doing a large ftp from A to B, and then start an ftp from B
to C, I begin to see problems. Usually the network interface on A (or B)
will appear to stall after a little while (usually between 10 seconds and a
minute), and it will be unable to ping any of the other machines. The ping
fails with the message :
"ping: sendto: No buffer space available"

If I do an 'ifconfig rtk0 x.x.x.x', the interface wakes up, and I can ping
etc. etc. However if the ftps are still going on it will stall again after a
little while.

It is not always the same box which stalls, but at least one of them does
*every* time. The fact that it is not always the same machine which has
problems would suggest that it is not a flakey card??

Has anyone seen these kinds of problems before, any ideas what could be
causing them, and any solutions?? Would it be a good idea to replace *all*
of the network cards and give it another bash? How about the hub, could that
possibly be the problem?

Any help would be much appreciated...
 Stuart