Hi List, After a motherboard failure in a machine, I purchased a cheap AXPER motherboard to replace it. The machine is a Socket478 P4 with a Via Rhine onboard NIC. I've read/heard a lot to say "don't use vr cards, they suck" kind of talk - but wanted to go through the official channels to find out if there is anything I can do to resolve my particular issue. Once booted, the machine is contactable locally, can be pinged and can ssh to it. After what appears to be a random amount of time (I have observed between 5 and 30 minutes as of now), the vr0 interface seems to just hang. The machine cannot be pinged, and no services running on the machine are contactable. What is really strange, is that I can still ssh the machine from 'external' to our network (a port forward on a router, straight to the machine) and gain access that way, which tells me the card isn't completely dead. If I then start a ping from the machine to another, suddenly everything springs back to life again and you can ssh the machine internally, and again access all of the services running on it. The only way I have found so far to keep the interface active, is to either a) leave a ping running to one of our servers or b) keep something like 'top' or 'systat' open at all times via an ssh session - which obviously isn't ideal! There is nothing in any logs that I can see. Relevant information; vr0: <VIA VT6102 Rhine II 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xee002000-0xee0020ff irq 23 at device 18.0 on pci0 FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE #0: Sat May 13 12:53:33 BST 2006 Kernel is GENERIC with the majority of SCSI/RAID removed. Any ideas/advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Graham Lilley
Gray Lilley wrote:> After a motherboard failure in a machine, I purchased a cheap AXPER > motherboard to replace it. The machine is a Socket478 P4 with a Via > Rhine onboard NIC.[...] > Once booted, the machine is contactable locally, can be pinged and can > ssh to it. After what appears to be a random amount of time (I have > observed between 5 and 30 minutes as of now), the vr0 interface seems to > just hang. The machine cannot be pinged, and no services running on the > machine are contactable. I have 2 machines with motherboard EPOX 8kra2+ with VIA Rhine vr0 NIC. One as desktop and the second as testing machine. Both with AMD Barton 2500+ On desktop machine I can run w2k, FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 6.1 (6.0 earlier), on testing machine is FreeBSD 6.0. On desktop I mainly work under w2k, connecting by Putty SSH to testing machine and others. Sometimes I am working under FreeBSD 5.4 or 6.1, conecting to other machines on the internet (outgoing ftp/ssh/http) without any problems for about one year. Maybe I have luck, but I can't say anything bad about vr0. > Kernel is GENERIC with the majority of SCSI/RAID removed. I have GENERIC on testing machine and own kernel (GENERIC without SCSI/RAID) on desktop. Miroslav Lachman
Oops.. Forgot to reply back to the whole list. This issue went away after disabling dhclient on the vr0 interface. With the machine fixed IP, it's running an absolute dream - glad to see that FreeBSD wasn't fussy at all with using cheap hardware and changing hardware after an installation! Glad this machine wasn't using Windows! Thanks for replying though ML :) Regards, Graham Lilley Hardware / Network Engineer -----Original Message----- From: Miroslav Lachman [mailto:000.fbsd@quip.cz] Sent: 01 June 2006 11:43 To: Gray Lilley Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org; Graham Lilley Subject: Re: vr card issues on 6.1-STABLE Gray Lilley wrote:> After a motherboard failure in a machine, I purchased a cheap AXPER > motherboard to replace it. The machine is a Socket478 P4 with a Via > Rhine onboard NIC.[...] > Once booted, the machine is contactable locally, can be pinged and can > ssh to it. After what appears to be a random amount of time (I have > observed between 5 and 30 minutes as of now), the vr0 interface seems to > just hang. The machine cannot be pinged, and no services running on the > machine are contactable. I have 2 machines with motherboard EPOX 8kra2+ with VIA Rhine vr0 NIC. One as desktop and the second as testing machine. Both with AMD Barton 2500+ On desktop machine I can run w2k, FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 6.1 (6.0 earlier), on testing machine is FreeBSD 6.0. On desktop I mainly work under w2k, connecting by Putty SSH to testing machine and others. Sometimes I am working under FreeBSD 5.4 or 6.1, conecting to other machines on the internet (outgoing ftp/ssh/http) without any problems for about one year. Maybe I have luck, but I can't say anything bad about vr0. > Kernel is GENERIC with the majority of SCSI/RAID removed. I have GENERIC on testing machine and own kernel (GENERIC without SCSI/RAID) on desktop. Miroslav Lachman