broken fxp driver in 4.x ...

[Colin Farley]

I am also having them problem with the lnc driver.  It seems that
sometimes, when an alias is added gratuitous arp packets are not sent out
and until arp cache is expired or the arp table on the router is cleared
the host is unreachable.  It seems completely random and there seems to be
no way to predict when it will fail to send out gratuitous arp.

My configuration is probably somewhat different than most.  I have two
virtual boxes that do this (both are UCARP nodes) that live on a VMWare ESX
server.  I first found the problem when I was running 4.10-RELEASE on these
boxes after upgrading the 4.10-RELEASE-p16 the problem persists.
Unfortunately because this is a virtual machine I have no option to use a
different NIC so I am unable to test to see if this is a driver related
problem.  To work around this problem I will look into shortening the arp
cache on the only cisco router on the same subnet as this box but because
this solution is suppose to be highly available it's bothering me.

Since I've heard of this problem with both the em and fxp drivers maybe
it's not driver related?  Is there anyway to force gratuitous arp to be
sent out manually (maybe I could add this to my UCARP scripts)?

Colin


                                                                           
             "Marc G.                                                      
             Fournier"                                                     
             <scrappy at hub.org>                                          To 
             Sent by:                  freebsd-stable at freebsd.org          
             owner-freebsd-sta                                          cc 
             ble at freebsd.org                                               
                                                                   Subject 
                                       broken fxp driver in 4.x ...        
             08/22/2005 01:38                                              
             AM                                                            
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           





Several months ago, on one of our servers, we had an issue where if we
moved an IP between the servers, the 'ifconfig alias' on the server with
the em device seemed to 'hang' for 60 seconds or so (instead of coming
back right away like the other servers), and, for some reason, it didn't
send the arp out onto the network properly, so upstream routers weren't
being made aware of the change ...

Subsequent cvsup updates of the 4.x tree eventually got rid of that issue,
and the problem went away ...

Now, on one of our newer servers runnign a fairly recent cvsup of 4.x, the
fxp driver is doing the exact same thing ... all the other fxp based
servers do a nice quick 'ifconfig alias' for an IP, and arp broadcasts are
sent out, but on this one, I get the '60 second hang' and have to get our
network guys to clear arp caches for  the changes to take effect :(

Has anyone else running 4.x experienced this?  Or am I just unlucky with
these things?  Is there a way of fixing it?

Thanks ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664
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