jared r r spiegel wrote:
On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 10:01:21PM -0600, Breen Ouellette wrote:
A few months ago, Didier Wiroth posted to this list that his net4801 with
a vpn1411 was giving him 'Corrupted MAC on input' errors. He was looking
for a solution to this problem.
i think i chimed in on that one.
since i put may.1st snapshots on my 4801, it has not happened at all.
this was the same situation for me as before; i started to see the
'corrupted MAC on input' after one snapshot, and then a few snapshots
later, it went away entirely. this last time, it showed up after
a december-ish snapshot (iirc, whatever i had in my last post about
it ...), and since may.1 snapshot, it is entirely non-present
Just so you are aware, this problem is not necessarily limited to
OpenBSD. A NetBSD user stated on the Soekris tech list that he had seen
the error a couple of times, but he no longer has a net4801/vpn1411
combination to test the script against. As well, a FreeBSD user
reported the same trouble in a different thread. The problem is that
this error is sporadic enough that no one appears to have confirmed the
cause so that the responsible party(ies) may be notified. Since many
types of hardware error can be responsible for similar behaviour it has
been too easy to blame it on a ghost in the system. However, I started
out with just a net4801, which I used for more than a year before
getting the vpn1411. During that year my box ran flawlessly, so when the
errors cropped up after installing the vpn1411 I was in the relatively
unique position of knowing that the net4801 was fine, while most people
seem to buy the set, experience errors, get told it is a hardware
problem (bad RAM, bad NIC, bad network device), and take it at face
value. It still could be a hardware problem, but it is not the only
possibility and I would like clear evidence before I blame the card.
The fact that I have only seen this reported on BSD systems could be an
indication that there is a problem with the Hifn driver _IF_ they all
share a common code base. Having a quick look at the source code on the
web indicates to me that several sources have been used to create the
Hifn driver. Perhaps a developer can enlighten us about whether or not
there is a shared code base (or cooperation) between projects.
I have seen my script run for several minutes before glitching out, so
if you have the time to run it for a solid 10 minutes using SSH2/AES it
will go a long way to confirming that you haven't just been lucky to
avoid the error since you began using the May 1st snapshot. I've
personally used several SSH2/AES sessions for regular use for more than
30 minutes in the last week without experiencing an error (yet at other
times it has failed within a minute of regular use). It seems rather
unlikely (although not impossible) that the OpenBSD developers would
regress the code to a breakable state and then fix it again, so my money
would be on your being lucky the last few weeks and that most people
sluff this off as a problem with hardware. In fact, the WebCVS shows
that the last change to the Hifn driver was 4 months ago, which would
indicate that for the May 1st snapshot to fix this problem the error
would have to exist outside of the driver itself, lending more
credibility to the hypothesis that you still have a problem but you just
haven't experienced it.
Thanks for your post. I hope you take it one step further and run that
script (and then report your result to this list)! :)
Breeno
