Pat_Barron@TRANSARC.COM (04/13/91)
I've been seeing a very strange problem with our RS/6000's and their Ethernet interfaces; I was hoping someone here might have seen it, too, and might be able to point me in the direction of a fix. We believe that we have an Ethernet card or tranceiver someplace on our network that is going bad, and is generating garbage Ethernet packets. Specifically, packets longer than the maximum allowable Ethernet packet length. Our Suns react to this by printing a "giant packet" message on the console and ignoring it. A number of our RS/6000's react by having their Ethernet interfaces silently lock up. I'm not sure if they transmit packets or not, but they certainly don't receive any. Each occurence only affects some subset of our machines, and it doesn't happen on the same set of machines every time. But on the machines it does happen on, their Ethernets lock up simultaneously, and it's definitely correlated to the "giant packet" messages on the Sun. The only fix we've found is to reboot the system. Anyone have any clues what's going on? My best guess is that the giant packet is causing the Ethernet card itself to get into a funky state. Is there any way of resetting the Ethernet card (in terms of performing a *hardware* reset on it) on the fly? Any other suggested solutions? Thanks, --Pat.