Network loss

[Markus Gebert]

On 27.02.2014, at 18:02, Jack Vogel <jfvogel at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would make SURE that you have enough mbuf resources of whatever size pool
> that you are
> using (2, 4, 9K), and I would try the code in HEAD if you had not.
> 
> Jack

Thanks for the suggestion, but I do not think it has anything to do with resource problems. We checked netstat -m among other things all the time when the problem was occurring, and never saw any indication of an mbuf shortage or anything similar. Looking at the symptoms we experienced, especially the TCP connections that never timed out, could that even be explained by mbuf shortage?

At the time we checked, 9.2 included the most recent driver AFAIR. But this was 3 months ago, I’ll check if something was commited in the meantime that could help us.

What I remember now is that we did see some error counter sysctl within dev.ix rise during the network problem. It suggested that something went wrong on the MAC layer when sending packages. I disabled flow control, but that did not help.

Rick was so kind to point me to this other thread here:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=279182+0+current/freebsd-net

It’s about FreeBSD 10 and his links are flapping, which they didn’t in our case, so I did not read that thread carefully at first. But now the OP has found out that his issues were caused by bad firmware, I’m not sure anymore, if our problems could be related to his (instead of the nfs/mbuf problem). What do you think Jack? Is there a way to tell what firmware we have, and what’s has been fixed in a more recent firmware release?


Markus