inquire to 11.0 & 11.1 users

[Ernie Luzar]

Hello all 11.x users.

I would like to inquiry if your seeing this message set in your
  /var/log/messages file happening at random times during the day?

kernel: Interface: watchdog timeout
kernel: Interface: link state changed to down
kernel: Interface: link state changed to up

The Interface being the one connected to your ISP.


I am getting this interface hardware hand shake error messages a few 
times an hour to a few times a day. Totally random. The server can be at 
total idle and it still happens.

The watchdog timeout is a interface hardware hand shake error and the 
interface down/up is how the watchdog recovers from this error.

I have gotten this error message group running 11.0 and 11.1 on a amd64 
system and on i386 system, gigabit interfaces em0 and vge0, and 10/100 
interface rl0 and xl0. Also with 2 different modems, a gigabit modem and 
a 10/100 modem. The gigabit modem has an admin system with an event log 
and there has never been a event logged of any kind.

When this watchdog error happens and I am watching a streamed movie on 
my windows10 pc attached to the LAN the connection is lost to the 
streaming server and I have to login in again and start at beginning of 
movie.

But the real problem is what this watchdog reset does to any aliases 
attached to that interface. Before the reset the first inet on the 
interface is the ISP issued IP address followed by what ever number of 
aliases I may have added. After the watchdog reset the first inet is now 
the first alias and the ISP IP is the last inet in the list. This causes 
the internet connection to vanish.

I have to reboot or manually remove all the aliases so the ISP IP 
address inet is the only thing remaining on the interface and then the 
internet connection is restored at which time I have to re-add all the 
aliases again.

This alias re-order problem is a strong indicator that this a kernel 
software problem.

This post is just am attempt to see how wide spread this is.

So please take the time to review your logs as you may be unaware this 
is happening to you.

Thank you