[CentOS] tg3 BCM5755 intermittantly stops working after upgrade to 5.3.

[Michael Iatrou]

When the date was Tuesday 21 April 2009, Mangesh S. Umbarje wrote:

>            I have checked the physical connectivity which is perfectly
> fine. This machine is very critical which we need to keep running as much
> as possible. So I had gone to older kernel 2.6.18-92.1.17.el5. But along
> with this kernel, I had added one more Dlink ethernet card which shows to
> be
>
> 05:09.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc DGE-530T Gigabit Ethernet
> Adapter (rev 11) (rev 11)
>
> and it uses the skge driver.
>
>            So I could test the machine with this new card and
> kernel-2.6.18-92.1.17.el5 togather. Still I do get the network breaks but
> the frequency reduced to factor of Ten. The corresponding messages seen
> in the /var/log/messages are as follow.
>
> Apr 21 10:18:32 kernel: skge eth1: Link is down.
> Apr 21 10:18:36 kernel: skge eth1: Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex,
> flow control none Apr 21 10:18:55 kernel: skge eth1: Link is down.
> Apr 21 10:18:57 kernel: skge eth1: Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex,
> flow control none Apr 21 10:18:58 kernel: skge eth1: Link is down.
> Apr 21 10:19:01 kernel: skge eth1: Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex,
> flow control none

Try to disable auto-negotiation for the NIC, using ethtool. Set manually the 
speed to 100 and then 1000 Mbps and see what happens.

The machine has static IP or it uses DHCP? It's a good idea to do some 
traffic capture and check if there is any correlation between the traffic 
and the link state.

-- 
 Michael Iatrou