Hi,

I've been running Gentoo Linux with kernel 2.4.26-r9 and Debian Woody on a
hospital imaging network.

The introduction of both these machines appears to be associated with
connectivity loss of other computers on the same subnet.
There are a number of possible causes including:

* A malfunctioning cisco switch
* A misconfigured cisco switch
* Turning the Gentoo laptop into a packet sniffer using ethernet bridging
and the resulting carnage from turning STP on (This was once off and the
cisco routers have since been reset, won't do that again)
* Some kind of kernel misconfiguration (Note: IP forwarding is turned off)

I think that it is probably going to be very difficult to find the cause
of the problem without disturbing the clinical operation of the network.

So far, I have looked at migrating to FreeBSD, however, I'd prefer linux
because most of the scientific software we use is/will be packaged for
linux.

I wanted to know how to set up a very conservative eth0 interface. I was
thinking of possibly just having host entries on the routing table and no
net entries or default gateway. Would this achieve anything? Is there
anything I can do to the kernel to prevent network instabilities?

Thanks
Robbie

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