Bizarre Transmission-induced network bug, driver crapping out maybe?

[Amedee Van Gasse (ub)]

On Sun, February 28, 2010 12:01, Chris Neary wrote:
> Ok, wow, thanks for all the replies to my little retarded problem,
> first of all. :)
>
> Second, I did try changing the overall connection limit in
> Transmission to <100 (I set it at 80 first). It seemed to be working,
> until I woke up to the same problem this morning.
>
> Tail'd /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages but I was too late of course.
>
> So I restarted the networking service and watched it happen again over
> the course of a minute or two.
>
> /var/log/syslog showed this:
>
> Feb 28 10:52:02 empress kernel: [88632.816023] eth0: mii lpa=45e1
> adv=01e1 exp=0001.
> Feb 28 10:52:02 empress kernel: [88632.816031] eth0: link on 100 Mbps
> Full Duplex mode.
> Feb 28 10:52:03 empress kernel: [88633.465188] eth0: mii ext = 0000.
> Feb 28 10:52:03 empress kernel: [88633.488028] eth0: mii lpa=45e1
> adv=01e1 exp=0001.
> Feb 28 10:52:03 empress kernel: [88633.488036] eth0: link on 100 Mbps
> Full Duplex mode.
>
> But nothing else related to eth0.
>
> ifconfig displays:
>
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1b:b9:a7:c0:1d
>           inet addr:192.168.0.5  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>           inet6 addr: fe80::21b:b9ff:fea7:c01d/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:1577087 errors:36 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:36
>           TX packets:1475172 errors:0 dropped:64 overruns:0 carrier:0
>           collisions:762 txqueuelen:1000
>           RX bytes:1073393885 (1.0 GB)  TX bytes:845081642 (845.0 MB)
>           Interrupt:19 Base address:0xdead
>
> I'm not entirely sure what that means. My eyes/ears prick up over the
> errors:36 though, but I've no idea what to do about that.
>
> At this point if I ping the router or anything else I get Destination
> Host Unreachable.
>
> I don't think it's the router's fault, because the router stays
> functional throughout, and I restart my local service to get it to
> work again, without touching the router itself.
>
> To answer the other questions the NIC is onboard sis190, as I said;
> useless hardware! May buy a white-box NIC from Maplin tomorrow, and
> try that.
>
> I'll also try plugging direct to the net rather than via the router,
> but I doubt it will change anything.
>
> Cheers guys. :)

I'm still suspicious that the router is crapping out.
If you can test without the router, please do. It helps a lot in the
troubleshooting if you only have to look at one device.

Another test you could do is connect a second computer to the router (lend
a laptop from a friend) and test connectivity while the first computer has
problems.