Reproducible problems with re(4) on RELENG_7 and HEAD

[韓家標 Bill Hacker]

Aryeh Friedman wrote:
>> Has it recurred under 8-?
> 
> Yes... but as I said I have had no error messages just random dropouts
> and then reconnects after about 15 secs
> 
> 
>> Can you 'make' it happen again?
> 
> On demand no but everyday use yes.

and off-list said:

Aryeh Friedman wrote:
 >> Ok - here's what may be a slightly earlier rev on a Gigabyte GA G33-DS3R:
 >
 > For once you won't be accusing me of seeing ghosts ;-)

It isn't about 'ghosts'.

Its about thorough troubleshooting and reporting of the available facts vs the 
dollar under the tin-bin side-trips.

The NIC and drivers are only a small part of the network environment.

Long ago and far away, ethernet ran out of hard-coded MAC ID's (shorter at the 
time), so we assigned them by manual over-ride. As with setting up duplicate 
IP's inadvertantly, you can guess that there were problems.

Recently I've run into Pegasus II chipset USB ethernet adapters with ... 
duplicate factory-assigned MAC addresses. Something I hadn't expected to need to 
watch for in over a decade.

And only a problem if they show up on the same LAN, but - go figure - we had it 
happen on a 192 - internal subnet with just four machines, so...

Then there are ARP caches not cleared fast enough when you migrate IP's, faulty 
routers, hubs, cables, shit-storms on the channel from *other* boxen that block 
your packets...and so on...

None of which driver coders can do SQRT of FA about...

Let's find out what we actually have here...

'More facts, please'....

Bill