I'm a Linux novice and need a helping hand. I have an AMD64-3200, Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard with 1Gb RAM and 4x320Gb Western Digital IDEs as RAID 5 on a 3ware 7506-4 controller. This is my home file server, Internet router and firewall. The motherboard has two Gb ethernet interfaces, an nVidia CK804 controller (forcedeth driver) and a Marvell 88E8053 PCI-E controller (sky2 driver). I'm using the nVidia controller for the WAN side and the Marvell interface for the LAN side. It is completely up to date via yum and I don't have any additional repositories configured. Kernel is 2.6.20-1.2948.fc6 #1 SMP. I'm using rsync over ssh to backup a large amount of data(400Gb) to another FC6 host located on the LAN. The target host is running the same kernel version but it's i386. I'm using a cheap Netgear Gigabit switch, model GS108. After 40-50Gb is transferred, the AMD-64-3200 system's network completely drops and a reboot seems to be the only way to restore. Bringing the interface up/down or restarting networking entirely does not restore connectivity. I haven't tried reloading the modules yet. iptables is disabled. Network connectivity for all the other hosts on the LAN is just fine. There are no useful messages in /var/log/messages when this happens. I've heard of trouble with the sky2 driver specifically "card locking up under heavy transmit load". Is this still a problem? or do I have something else going on? Someone suggested the kernel option CONFIG_PROFILING hoses the sky2 driver. Is this true? If so, is option enabled in the FC6 kernel? How can I tell? I really need both interfaces fully functioning as I don't have any additional slots left in this box. It will eventually run MythTV with a PVR-350 and Audigy sound card filling all the available slots. I've just switched interfaces (nVidia for LAN) and we'll see if this repeats. If not, I'll single out the sky2 driver and look into trying to remove the CONFIG_PROFILING option in a custom kernel. Any other ideas? How can I further troubleshoot the dead interface? Thanks in advance, -Brian
