Steven
Hanley
About
email: sjh@svana.org
web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb
Other online diaries:
Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,
Links:
Linux Weekly News,
XKCD,
Girl Genius,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,
Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Months | ||
|---|---|---|
| Jan | Feb | Mar |
| Apr | May | Jun |
| Jul | Aug | Sep |
| Oct | Nov | Dec |
Categories:
- amusing - 37
- comp - 143
- blogging - 6
- blosxom - 12
- design - 5
- email - 7
- hardware - 37
- internet - 14
- ip - 4
- linux - 22
- prog - 2
- schwag - 2
- software - 17
- lca - 56
- leisure - 120
- books - 13
- food - 51
- holiday - 2
- music - 25
- screen - 21
- theatre - 5
- mtb - 438
- events - 113
- gear - 94
- various - 318
- ilmiwac - 38
- milkcarton - 21
- work - 5
- June 2018 (1)
- December 2016 (1)
- August 2016 (1)
- July 2016 (1)
- June 2016 (4)
- May 2016 (1)
- November 2015 (21)
- September 2014 (2)
- May 2014 (1)
- July 2013 (1)
- May 2013 (2)
- December 2012 (5)
- December 2011 (31)
- November 2011 (1)
- October 2011 (5)
- June 2011 (4)
- May 2011 (5)
- April 2011 (4)
- March 2011 (3)
- February 2011 (4)
- January 2011 (8)
- December 2010 (3)
- November 2010 (11)
- October 2010 (4)
- September 2010 (3)
- August 2010 (4)
- July 2010 (5)
- June 2010 (5)
- May 2010 (4)
- April 2010 (6)
- March 2010 (4)
- February 2010 (2)
- January 2010 (9)
- December 2009 (4)
- November 2009 (7)
- October 2009 (4)
- September 2009 (7)
- August 2009 (12)
- July 2009 (8)
- June 2009 (8)
- May 2009 (14)
- April 2009 (6)
- March 2009 (8)
- February 2009 (7)
- January 2009 (13)
- December 2008 (9)
- November 2008 (12)
- October 2008 (7)
- September 2008 (10)
- August 2008 (7)
- July 2008 (11)
- June 2008 (14)
- May 2008 (30)
- April 2008 (20)
- March 2008 (12)
- February 2008 (8)
- January 2008 (7)
- December 2007 (7)
- November 2007 (11)
- October 2007 (9)
- September 2007 (7)
- August 2007 (7)
- July 2007 (23)
- June 2007 (6)
- May 2007 (17)
- April 2007 (7)
- March 2007 (9)
- February 2007 (7)
- January 2007 (26)
- December 2006 (7)
- November 2006 (10)
- October 2006 (11)
- September 2006 (12)
- August 2006 (16)
- July 2006 (9)
- June 2006 (12)
- May 2006 (23)
- April 2006 (17)
- March 2006 (16)
- February 2006 (13)
- January 2006 (23)
- December 2005 (13)
- November 2005 (20)
- October 2005 (14)
- September 2005 (27)
- August 2005 (34)
- July 2005 (28)
- June 2005 (30)
- May 2005 (12)
- April 2005 (17)
- March 2005 (28)
- February 2005 (38)
- January 2005 (29)
- December 2004 (33)
- November 2004 (38)
- October 2004 (15)
- September 2004 (25)
Sat, 25 Jun 2005
Strange breakage - 23:33
I changed the machine I am using as the gateway/firewall at home finally
today. The old machine has been problematic for about two years, for some
reason it would not cleanly boot up a more recent kernel, nor would it reboot
cleanly, also it would sometimes panic when high memory use processes were
running such as large rsyncs. It appeared it may have been a memory problem
however after testing that it appeared it was something in the motherboard.
Anyway the new machine does not display the problem and is a fresh install of the new debian stable with the 2.6.8 kernel from that. This means I can finally do load balancing and priority for ssh and things like that on the gateway so bulk transfers will not make everything slow. (My flatmates all seem to be bittorrent or kazaa or whatever addicts)
When I first booted the box up and put in place I could ping machines the Big Bad Internet, however I was unable to make a tcp connection, tcpdump would see packets returning but they never seemed to get up to the application. This really had me stumped for a while, eventually I tried swapping the NIC hooked up to the ADSL modem with the NIC hooked up to the house LAN, to my surprise I found I was now unable to make tcp connections with machines in the house.
So it appears this NIC could process some packets such as ICMP, however did not fully process, or caused some other problem with TCP packets at least. I pulled the rather lovely DEC Tulip (one of two I purchased in 1999 because I wanted some real DEC Tulip cards before they ceased to exist) out of the old box and put it in in place of the card with the strange behaviour. Once the machine had booted with the Tulip everything worked perfectly.
The card with the strange behaviour is an older Tulip, a 21041 (10 MBit with a coax connector and cat5) rather than the 21141 now in there, both of them are using the de4x5 driver so it does not sound like a problem with the driver. Anyway, this is a really strange hardware problem.
