I recently removed a cable from a box that I was taking off the network. The other end was left plugged into the ethernet card on a Linux box kernel 2.4.2-2.
This box is connected to my ISP, Pacific Internet, via a permanent dial-up link. I soon received a bill from the ISP showing a tremendous spike in usage. I discovered that the NETDEV WATCHDOG program was producing timeout messages for eth0, which of course is the card that has the loose end. That interface shares the same IP address as the PPP0 so the timeout traffic was being sent across the PPP0 interface as well. The ISP reports that there was traffic to seemingly random IP addresses sent out over the internet but I don't understand why the netdev watchdog would be doing this. Does anyone have any idea about the behaviour of this utility? I have searched several other sites and cannot get enough detail. Regards -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
