New Kernel with Dell PE2950

[Catalin Miclaus]

-----Original Message-----
From: D Hill [mailto:d.hill at yournetplus.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 7:06 PM
To: Catalin Miclaus
Cc: FreeBSD-Questions
Subject: RE: New Kernel with Dell PE2950

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 at 18:44 +0100, catalin at starcomms.com confabulated:

> BTW....bce/bge drivers has known issues that leads to 'watchdog
timeout'
> NIC reset.
> I have same some 6-8 servers with your hardware configuration and we
> have ordered them with Intel Gigabit cards especially to avoid above
> issue.
> Use bce/bge NICs for low traffic interfaces if possible.

How can I see what you are referring to with the bge interfaces? We have
a 
PE6850 that has two bge interfaces. The server's roll is a spam filter 
server and processes close to 6.5 million messages per day.

However, I don't have the watchdog daemon running.




I don't remember exactly at which bandwidth consumption level the
watchdog timeout error starts appearing. Somewhere below 100Mbps.

You can see it if you enable the server to e-mail you the default daily
security report or from /var/log/messages file.

Jan  4 08:46:00 lb1 kernel: bge1: watchdog timeout -- resetting
Jan  4 08:46:00 lb1 kernel: bge1: link state changed to DOWN
Jan  4 08:46:02 lb1 kernel: bge1: link state changed to UP

BTW....watchdog is a kernel facility and it is enabled by default.
You can run a separate process if you want to control it (man watchdog).






Best Regards
Catalin Miclaus
Network/Security ISP-Data
Starcomms Ltd.