Rescuing the Ethernet Interface after SCB Timeout

[Martin McCormick]

	One of our FreeBSD systems has begun randomly shutting down
its Ethernet interface.  After doing so, the box continues to try to
run but prints the following errors in syslog:

Jan 16 03:01:23 xx /kernel: fxp0: SCB timeout: 0x70 0x0 0x50 0x400
Jan 16 03:01:24 xx /kernel: fxp0: SCB timeout: 0xf0 0x0 0x50 0x400
Jan 16 03:01:35 xx last message repeated 9 times
Jan 16 03:01:40 xx /kernel: fxp0: device timeout
Jan 16 03:01:40 xx /kernel: fxp0: DMA timeout
Jan 16 03:01:40 xx /kernel: fxp0: DMA timeout

	If we reboot, the system may be okay for 4 months or 2 hours,
who knows?  I can write a shell script to look for any new messages
like those shown above so determining that the failure has occurred is
not difficult especially since the system is still running all be it
without a network connection.

	Will bringing fxp0 down with ifconfig and then back up as in

ifconfig fxp0 down
sleep 5
ifconfig fxp0 up

	restore it to operation again?

	I am asking because the system is unreachable when fxp0 is
down.  If one was logged in to that system, is there anything we could
do to rescue it besides a full reboot?

	I want to make it rescue itself if it can since these things
always happen on holidays or weekends or at 03:00 in the morning.

	This system doesn't die that often, but it is often enough to
take measures to prevent it from needing our laying on of hands at odd
hours.

	Thank you.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group