Re: [afnog]system Hanging

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 06:01:38AM -0700, Paul wrote:
>    Pls I need your help and technical advice on my server that is
>    misbehaving. whenever I plug in the local Area Network on the switch
>    after some few minutes the system will hang not until I unplug it it
>    will pick up again,
> 
>    Pls what do you think could be the problem, is it the sytems resources
>    or the that the internet access on the server had a virus or one of
>    the client has a virus.

Layer 1 problems:
  - bad cable         (try a new cable)
  - bad switch port   (try plugging into a different port, or a new switch)
  - bad NIC           (try a new NIC)
  - interrupt conflicts  (shouldn't be a problem with PCI NICs, but with
                          ISA NICs try configuring to a different IRQ)

Layer 2 problems:
  - full/half duplex mismatch  (if 100Mbps, check whether both ends have
    negotiated either full-duplex or half duplex)

Layer 3 problems:
  - you have two machines configured with the same IP address
    (if you have a FreeBSD box on your network, look in /var/log/messages
     to see if ARP conflicts are reported. Try disconnecting your server
     then doing
              arp -d x.x.x.x
              ping x.x.x.x
     where x.x.x.x is your server's IP, and see if another machine responds.
     Try renumbering the server to a free IP address)

Layer 7 problems:
  - bad driver software    (see if there's an upgraded driver for your NIC)
  - bad operating system   (reinstall your system with FreeBSD *)
  
* Not as unlikely an option as you might think. Samba is now a reasonable
replacement for an NT4.0 server.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33056.html

Brian.
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