I have a Compaq SFF P3 with FreeBSD 6.1. It has an intel chipset including an inbuilt network card. The network runs with the e100 module in linux, and the fxp driver in freebsd.
The machine is fairly busy constantly bittorrenting, but it should hardly be taxing it, it having a 100M network card and torrenting to my 256k/128k scummy connection to the wide world. Trouble is the network keeps dropping out, and seems to require a reboot to make it work again. ssh and bittorrent and ping and anything else stop. ifconfig reveals no apparent change - ie the network is still apparently configured with an IP address etc.Luckily I have it attached to a KVM so I can get into it to reboot, as of course ssh stops working. This happens at random intervals, sometimes going fine for a week, then doing it again within a couple of hours of reboot. There is nothing in dmesg, nor anything in any of the files in /var/log that give me any clue at all how to diagnose further. The only warning is that the ssh session dies and the box will not respond to anything. The box does nothing else except occasionally serving up content to the media PC via samba. Its load average is pretty low. Drop outs do not seem to correspond to any extra load. I have googled, to no avail.
