Suddenly IP aliases don't work from rc file?

[khatfield at socllc.net]

I think I missed Chris' response prior to replying to this but I agree as it could have just been an ARP issue but if it fails on reboot then that shows it's something else.

Assigning 255.255.255.255 would assume each IP is assigned to the primary IP. However, the subnet for the primary is a /23 subnet. Either the company you're renting from has horrible methods of managing the way IP's are issued or it's incorrect in itself.

I would verify all of the information is indeed what they have set upstream. If it is, I cannot fathom the amount of arp spam your box is getting anyway.

Also with Chris' statement: RealTek is generic enough that works and it works on just about anything. However, they offer no real tuning or much support community-wise when it comes to getting the best throughput or even troubleshooting. The idea is that it should 'just work'. My personal opinion is if they have an Intel card lying around, ask them to stick an Intel (1000) card in there and at least you guarantee no driver issues and really the best out-of-the-box performance.

Of course, that would be the last resort as you're wanting to simply fix the problem right now. However, if all of the above fails - change the card. You would be surprised when it comes to tons of trash traffic how some cards can be flakey or cause the system's CPU's to actually do more work than would be required with a higher-end NIC.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Chris Buechler" <cbuechler at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 7:36pm
To: up at 3.am
Cc: freebsd-isp at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Suddenly IP aliases don't work from rc file?

On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 7:00 PM,  <up at 3.am> wrote:
> A dedicated server that I rent has a primary IP and 6 alias IPs.  Everything was
> working ok with the rc.conf configured like this:
>
> ifconfig_rl0="inet primary.ip.address netmask 255.255.254.0"
>
> The primary IP above comes up fine.  I then have:
>
> ifconfig_rl0_alias0="inet second.ip.addr netmask 255.255.255.255"
> ifconfig_rl0_alias1="inet third.ip.addr netmask 255.255.255.255"
>
> and so on.  This worked fine until we had an Ethernet card go bad.  It was
> replaced and I had to use a different driver, but none of the alias IPs worked.
> They showed up in ifconfig, but they couldn't be reached from outside the
> localhost.  So, I had them put in an identical Realtek s before, change the driver
> back as above but the problem persisted.
>
> I tried moving the ifconfig lines from the end of the rc file to near the
> beginning, right after the main IP ifconfig, but still no go after rebooting each
> time.  I messed around with this for a while and finally just removed the alias
> IPs using the manual "ifconfig rl0 second.ip.addr netmask 255.255.255.255 -alias"
> and re-adding it the same way.  That got those IPs working again.
>
> The only thing I can think of is that this server does have an onboard Attansic
> Ether that the GENERIC kernel sees...we actually used it yesterday after the first
> Realtek died and it worked fine for a while, then would just crap out
> intermittently.  We went back to Realtek and that fixed the connection crappiness,
> but that's when the alias problems began...all I had done was change the driver
> letters.  One thing that makes me wonder about the other Ether is that "netstat
> -rn showed "link#2" for the alias IPs.  However, it still shows that after
> deleting and re-adding them, which fixed it.
>
> Any ideas?  It's working now but any kind of reboot is going to cause havoc.

Are you sure it's the reboot that causes havoc? Sounds like you may
have been fighting an ARP cache upstream that either timed out or got
updated in the process of mucking around with the IPs. I also wouldn't
touch a server with Realtek NICs in it, probably the worst NIC
hardware ever built.
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