ping: sendto: No buffer space available

[jaime at snowmoon.com]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Bill Moran wrote:
> > 	I think that the NIC is on the logic board.  I can try to install
> > a PCI card and use that in its place to see if the problem goes away.
> > Should I bother?
>
> I would.  There are two possibilities that I would consider here:
> a) The NIC has gone flaky with age
> b) Newer drivers don't talk to that particular NIC as well as the old
>
> Did you notice this starting to happen after a particular upgrade?  You
> may be able to correlate this with a particular update to the driver by
> looking at dates in the cvs logs.

	Nope.  The problem is only a few days old and the OS is
4.7-Stable.  I think that the last update was in February or so.


> This is hearsay, and I have no personal experience with it, but I've
> seen lots of complaints across the lists about "onboard" cards that
> use the fxp driver not being very good.  I've never had (nor heard of)
> any problems with the PCI versions.

	Hrm....  An interesting thought....


> Another possibility is hardware ... have you added any hardware or
> changed any BIOS settings?  There's the possibility of interrupt
> problems.

	No.  The system was up for more than 2 months before the problems
began.


> I'm just shooting out ideas for you to work with.  Please distill
> everything I've said through your own experience.  i.e. take it with
> a grain of salt, as I don't _know_ what your problem is.

	I always try to take email list advice this way.  :)


> Never helped for me either.  You may want to check, but in my experience
> the output of 'netstat -m' will also tell you that you have plenty of
> network buffers available.

bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
144/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        139 mbufs allocated to data
        5 mbufs allocated to packet headers
138/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines

	That was durring normal operation.  The following are at the tail
end of one of the outages:

bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
477/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        386 mbufs allocated to data
        91 mbufs allocated to packet headers
384/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
476/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        387 mbufs allocated to data
        89 mbufs allocated to packet headers
385/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
182/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        149 mbufs allocated to data
        33 mbufs allocated to packet headers
147/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
156/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        153 mbufs allocated to data
        3 mbufs allocated to packet headers
151/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
135/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        134 mbufs allocated to data
        1 mbufs allocated to packet headers
132/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
bash-2.05b$ netstat -m
144/768/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
        139 mbufs allocated to data
        5 mbufs allocated to packet headers
136/572/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
1336 Kbytes allocated to network (6% of mb_map in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines

	It looks like something is causing it to pile up packets in the
buffers temporarily.  Any thoughts?  In the mean time, I will see if I can
dig up a PCI ethernet card.

							Thanks,
							Jaime