Re: Network problem: hard or soft?

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Darren Cook wrote:

> I switched my test server off yesterday to move and dust... it rebooted
> okay but it won't let me assign IP addresses to the network card (I
> can't ping the router; running ifup -a manually failed). The network
> card detected okay in the boot sequence and there are no errors for it.
> 
> The connectivity light is on on the router, but off on the network card
> on the server. First time I've seen that - they are normally either both
> on or both off. When I turning server power off the light goes off on
> the router.
> 
> Am I looking for a config problem or a new network card? This is the
> first time I've rebooted since I added new ip addresses to that card a
> month or two back. IIRC I just edited /etc/network/interfaces. (Debian
> potato).

I had a problem with the 2.2.10 kernel whereby it would hard lock anytime
you tried to assign an IP address to any make and model of NIC that used a
PCI bus.  that problem was specific to that kernel release, though.  If
you're using a different kernel, and it was working before, i'd say it's a
bad NIC.

Just for my information, is it a 3COM NIC?

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Cisco Certified Network Associate, Sun Solaris Certified Systems Administrator
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company