On 05 Oct 2002 00:09:39 -0700 James Sparenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 08:10, Mark Stewart wrote:
> > 
> > Networking gurus, your knowledge is desperately needed...
> > 
> > I have my Mdk8.2 box setup on our corporate network with a static
> > IP. Call it mybox.foo.com. I have a laptop running Win2K that lives
> > on our wireless LAN and uses a DHCP-allocated IP and lives in a
> > subnet. Call it laptop.dhcp.foo.com. The trouble is that unless I
> > first ping the laptop from mybox, I cannot reach mybox from the
> > laptop. More problematically, if I leave an ssh connection from the
> > laptop to mybox idle for more than say 5 minutes the connection
> > dies. If I reboot into Win2K on mybox I don't have to ping first to
> > allow the laptop to connect and connections once made continue to
> > work for as long as you like. It just works.
> 
> Had this problem about 2 years ago with an ALL FreeBSD/Win98 network. 
> with 7 mini-lans in different rooms of our office we noticed that
> boxes kept dropping off the net... but never the windows ones.  Turned
> out that the problem was because FreeBSD and we later found Linux as
> well don't keep "chattering" over the net and the Hubs (all switched
> 10/100 hubs) kept "losing" the boxes.  We'd have to do two way pings
> to get the FreeBSD boxes back up every morning...(do a tcpdump
> sometime when the network is quite and you'll see your windows boxes
> chattering away.)  
> 
> The solution.  a little script that did 3 pings to the firewall. 
> Slept for 15 minutes and then did 3 pings again.  

James,

That's a "workaround"...  :)  the solution is to have the bug fixed...
Don't have time to pull up the specs; but any packet for which there is
no MAC-to-output-port mapping is to be "flooded" out all ports.  If this
is not done by a particular switch box, or VLAN, it's a bug.

[Sidebar:  similar effect occurs when the bridge/switch/VLAN tables are
smaller than the number of boxes directly connected -- I call this a
"leaky" <foo> box...  It's an interesting mental exercise to understand
this... :^) ]

> Not all of the switched hubs did this (the 3coms for example) but some
> of the NetGear and lynksys ones did.  

NetGear (others?) ships dumb hubs (real ones, not switches labelled
"hub") with out-of-spec* crystals which can produce a similar symptom,
excect that the problem affects only long packets.

  *   +/- 0.001%  i.e., 1000Hz for 10MHz

LinkSys have an isolated development group that won't listen to customer
complaints.

Pierre

> James
> 
> > 
> > Our LAN admin, who clearly knows much more about Windows, is
> > pointing the finger at the OS since he isn't required to support
> > Linux. Our network has a bunch of VLANs in it, the details to which
> > I am not privy but if there's something that might be relevant I can
> > ask him about it. On the other hand, if anyone understands what's
> > going on here that has to do with how I've got mybox configured I
> > would really love to know. Just to be clear, I'm not running any
> > firewalls or anything, no iptables, ipchains, etc. I am running NFS,
> > Samba, ssh, and proftpd.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance for any and all thoughts,
> > 
> > ::mark
> > 
> > 
> > ----
> > 
> 
> > Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? 
> > Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
> 
> 
> 
> 

Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? 
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com

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