I've been having problems with my test machines disappearing off of the network. When it happens, the machine does not respond to any incoming traffic. However, if I ping out, the connection starts working again. I'm guessing the card is somehow going to sleep and not responding until it sees outgoing traffic. The ARP entry still exists on the switch and router. I've had this problem with various versions of FreeBSD.
What kind of switch are you connecting everything together with?
The only time I've ever seen this is with a switch that had an option to disable interfaces that had too much broadcast traffic. If the machine set idle too long, the ARP and other messages it was sending would cause it to be "shut off" by the switch, but as soon as you started sending some non-broadcast traffic again (such as ping), it would re-enable the port and things would work OK. I would suggest disabling that feature of the switch (if that's the problem) unless you're having problems with excessive broadcast traffic on your network. The workaround I used (because the sysadmin refused to reconfigure the switch because he didn't understand it) was to create a daemon "ping" process using & and using an -i 30 switch. For example, I had a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d like so: #!/bin/sh /sbin/ping -i 30 192.168.5.27 & Where the IP is simply the IP of another machine on the network. This doesn't hurt much if the network is so idle that it's causing the switch to shut off ports anyway. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
