Oi! You're NIC'd, mate!

[unixronin]

So, I use an open-source backup system called Bacula.  Last night, I labelled the four brand-new 170m tapes that arrived yesterday afternoon and started full backups for the first time in nine months.  All the clients went smoothly except for vorlon, my Athlon46/PCI-Express übergamebox, which would run for five seconds to a minute before the connection dropped.

Fifteen hours later, I've found the culprit.  vorlon's motherboard has two onboard gigabit NICs, one an nForce NIC built into its nForce4 chipset, the other a Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E NIC.  Just as an experiment, after perusing megabytes of debugging logs from the storage daemon, I tried switching vorlon's Ethernet connection from the nVidia NIC to the Marvell NIC and .... poof!  Problem vanished, just like that.

vorlon is now happily streaming data across the network to babylon5 as fast as babylon5's VXA-1 tape drive can write it to tape.  Clearly, there's something subtly wrong with the nForce NIC, but I don't know yet whether it's at the hardware, firmware or driver level.  So, I guess I'm just not going to use it any more.

It'll be interesting if this change turns out to fix vorlon's intermittent random-lockup problem too.

Now it just remains to build and install bacula clients on yama and nijo.

Comments

[databeast.livejournal.com]

drool, I want your hardware .

wow, that sounded teh g4y.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

heh. :)

I'll post g33kpr0n photos in a few days, as soon as I get the other 711 array online and get the battery door cover for the big UPS on.

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

My mobo (MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI) has the nForce 4 SLI chipset and it also has problems if I use the integrated NIC. I can't maintain a connection. For example, World of Warcraft will drop connection after a few minutes. If I should install the nVidia firewall software and use it, especially if I activate ActiveArmor (the hardware firewall in the chipset), I lose all network functionality, period.

Fortunately, like yours, my mobo also has a Marvell Yukon NIC and I have had no problems whatsoever using it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If I should install the nVidia firewall software and use it, especially if I activate ActiveArmor (the hardware firewall in the chipset), I lose all network functionality, period.

Yup, I had precisely the same experience. Sure, the box is secure ..... it's also what we call CATATONIC.

My motherboard, for reference, is a GigaByte K8N Ultra SLI.