> Whenever I boot my computer with the 2.6.x.FC2smp kernel, my network
> card behaves very strangely: connectivity is sporadic at best, and many
> connections time out completely. Pings even to other computers on my
> own network indicate packet drops of up to 94% (except for 127.0.0.1, of
> course). When I boot into the non-SMP kernel, though, I don't
> experience this problem. All of the network settings are the same
> whether I boot into SMP or not.
:
:
> I've gone into the network configuration tool several times, and reset
> everything I could think of, even changed the IRQ value. Nothing seems
> to help.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> --
> Richard S. Crawford / http://www.mossroot.com
Hi Richard,
Not sure if this is exactly the same issue or not -- but it
seems I may have encountered something similar back in early
November, when I had just installed FC2 on my new dual Xeon
CPU box from Dell. This was a tough nut to crack, as the slow
performance only seemed to happen between my desktop and
seemingly random remote hosts -- while traffic to other hosts
was working fine. Upgrading the kernel to 2.6.9-1.1_FC2smp, the
latest (test) version available for FC2 at that time, did the trick.
Turns out the e1000 ethernet device driver being used on my Dell
workstation had a lot of improvements in the later kernel.
FYI I never encountered this at all since upgrading to FC3.
I recommend finding a later version of the kernel than the one
you're using now. You may find that the ethernet driver code
from the later kernel has improvements for your specific card,
and the problem may magically go away.
Hope this information is helpful to you.
--
Steve Thorpe
Systems Programmer/Analyst
MCNC Grid Computing and Networking Services
