NIC goes down upon Gnome logout

[Ryan Jacobs]

Hummm, I think I may have figured this out, so I will answer my own post 
in case it's useful to anyone else....

I spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting this, trying to get some 
kind of error. What I finally found was that when I could duplicate the 
error (killing eth0 simply by logging out of Gnome), doing an "ifconfig 
eth0 down" followed by "ifconfig eth0 up" would result in the following 
error"

irq 18: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)....

right, so it seemed like some irq conflict was happening out-of-the 
blue. So I did some google checking on irqpoll, and figured out how to 
modify the grub configuration to activate this irqpoll thing (just added 
"irqpoll" to the kernel line in the grub conf.)

After doing this, I have not been able to duplicate the problem again, 
so I am hoping it's solved....

But my question is this:

What is it that I just did??

What does irqpoll actually do?, and if it's an integral part is 
preventing irq conflicts, why is it not active by default? Does it take 
up heaps of resources, or cause other problems that I should be aware of?

Cheers, and thanks for the help,
Ryan



Ryan Jacobs wrote:
> Hi Lee,
> 
> Thanks for the response. Actually we are not using any GUI utility. 
> Currently, we have 2 NICs that are bridged together (one side to ADSL 
> modem, other side to internal net). We monitor the traffic through this 
> bridge with ntop (in South Africa, ADSL bandwidth usage if often capped, 
> so we have to watch things closely). Later we could apply firewall rules 
> across these NICs, but currently we have none defined, and no actual 
> firewall-specific software.
> 
> What is strange is that this bridge structure was installed after 
> upgrading to Hoary, and furthermore, we experienced the exact same 
> problem when there was only 1 NIC (and no bridge, etc...). The only link 
> I can make is that something changed when upgrading to Hoary, otherwise 
> I am at a loss.....
> 
> Does anyone have any other insight into what processes actually happen 
> upon interface login/logout? If runlevels were changed I would start 
> troubleshooting the "kill" statements in the appropriate rcx.d, for 
> example... but I don't have any such leads. Perhaps, like Lee said, 
> there is something starting upon login to Gnome that effects the network 
> upon logout (like a firewall), but I don't know of such a thing at the 
> moment...
> 
> Thanks,
> Ryan
> 
> Lee Braiden wrote:
> 
>> On Monday 05 September 2005 11:37, Ryan Jacobs wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> If I login as an admin user directly to the local Gnome interface, and
>>> later logout back to the default graphical welcome/login screen, one of
>>> the servers NICs dies (upon logout). "Dies" is the only term I can think
>>> of because logging back in and checking the status shows that it's
>>> enabled, and an ifconfig shows that its retained it's setting and is
>>> active. However, pinging anything through this NIC (from outside to the
>>> server, or from the server outside) simply fails. The only way to get it
>>> working again is a reboot.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Are you running (or have you previously used) a GUI-based firewall 
>> utility?  Sounds like the firewall is blocking everything on logout.
>>
>>  
>>
>