vr card issues on 6.1-STABLE

Gray Lilley gray at mistaken-identity.co.uk
Sun May 14 02:10:34 PDT 2006


Hi List,

 

After a motherboard failure in a machine, I purchased a cheap AXPER
motherboard to replace it.  The machine is a Socket478 P4 with a Via
Rhine onboard NIC.

 

I've read/heard a lot to say "don't use vr cards, they suck" kind of
talk - but wanted to go through the official channels to find out if
there is anything I can do to resolve my particular issue.

 

Once booted, the machine is contactable locally, can be pinged and can
ssh to it.  After what appears to be a random amount of time (I have
observed between 5 and 30 minutes as of now), the vr0 interface seems to
just hang.  The machine cannot be pinged, and no services running on the
machine are contactable.  What is really strange, is that I can still
ssh the machine from 'external' to our network (a port forward on a
router, straight to the machine) and gain access that way, which tells
me the card isn't completely dead.  If I then start a ping from the
machine to another, suddenly everything springs back to life again and
you can ssh the machine internally, and again access all of the services
running on it.  The only way I have found so far to keep the interface
active, is to either a) leave a ping running to one of our servers or b)
keep something like 'top' or 'systat' open at all times via an ssh
session - which obviously isn't ideal!

 

There is nothing in any logs that I can see.

 

Relevant information;

 

vr0: <VIA VT6102 Rhine II 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem
0xee002000-0xee0020ff irq 23 at device 18.0 on pci0

 

FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE #0: Sat May 13 12:53:33 BST 2006

 

Kernel is GENERIC with the majority of SCSI/RAID removed.

 

Any ideas/advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers,

 

Graham Lilley



More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list