[mythtv-users] OT: NIC going away.

[Mike Perkins]

On 08/02/12 15:06, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> On 02/08/2012 04:49 AM, phipps-hutton at sky.com wrote:
>>
>> Quoting Michael Watson<michael at thewatsonfamily.id.au>:
>>
>>>     My MBE has started doing the same things, I was running a Realtek 8169
>>> and the Onboard Intel E1000 bonded, until this started happening
>>> (removed Realtek and bond setup, as I have had this happen previously
>>> when a cheapo Realtek card started failing), and the E1000 is loosing
>>> contact overnight (works flawlessly all day, then sometime between 2:00
>>> AM and 7:00 AM everynight, it stops responding, unable to ping its own
>>> IP).  A reboot fixes it.  System is 5+ Years old though, could possibly
>>> be failling NIC
>>
>> And don't forget that NICs are always connected to another NIC at the
>> end of the cable. I had problems that sound similar. They went away
>> when I replaced the shabby ISP broadband router with a Netgear Gigabit
>> unmanaged switch.
>
> That's a good point to remember when trouble-shooting. What appear to be
> cable problems are sometimes router failures.
>
>
> In my case, though the box could not reach the router and swapping
> cables (the hdhr<>  mythbox) did nothing wrt contacting the box. But I
> could still see the hdhr from the laptop, going through the router.
>
We had a power spike a couple months back and after I'd laboriously brought all 
the boxes back up and checked for disk errors, etc, I still couldn't get things 
to talk properly. Some would, some wouldn't. Heck of a fault to diagnose, 
especially when what worked when I brought it out of the cupboard (to connect up 
a keyboard and display) wouldn't work when I put it back...

In the end I discovered that *half* my 16-port switch had failed. The failure 
wasn't immediately noticeable since the driver chips were OK and all the lights 
came up on the links. Opening it up I found there were two chips that did 
everything, one for each bank of eight ports, and one of these had failed.

Until the replacement switch came I re-arranged my ports to use the half that 
still worked, plus some old units. I *just* had enough spare kit to lash 
together a network that ran.

Moral: sometimes swapping cables isn't enough.

-- 

Mike Perkins