Re: Strange networking problems after update 5.2.1->5.3

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Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 11:16:54 +0100
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org

>> I recently updated my old Compaq Armada 1500c from 5.2.1 to 5-stable. 5.2
>> worked fine, the update went without any noticable problem according to the
>> docs. 5.3 behaves well apart from a strange networking problem.
>> The notebook lives in a /16 subnet with a /16 netmask and has a 16bit
>> NE2000 PCMCIA-card (Longshine).
>> Things that do work:
>> - ping to hosts in /24
>> - ssh to hosts in /24
>> - nis with a server in /24
>> Things that don't work:
>> - ping from any host
>> - ping to hosts outside /24
>> - nfs
>> - query dns in /16
>> - connecting ntp server in /16

> The summary appears to be "known local things work, less local things
> don't", although for the NFS instance it's unclear if that's local or not.

Well, what surprised me most was the fact that nothing gets to this notebook
from the outside. I cannot ping it even from a host connected to the same
switch being in the same /24 subnet.
The nfs server was in /24, too.

>This suggests a routing or ARP problem.

I think if there are such problems, they're the result of something else
that is broken with the pcmcia card itself (wrong initialization or
whatever).

I took the notebook home via New Year's and tried to hunt the problem down.
My network at home is somewhat simpler (192.168.1.0/24 is local,
192.168.1.253 is another notebook that is acting as NAT and default router).

> route -n get default
> route -n get {host in /24}
> route -n get {host in /16}

Looks ok for me. netstat doesn't show any problems either.

>Check "arp -a" and make sure that the default gateway is what you expect,
>and check to make sure it's hardware address is right. You may want to
>compare against what you see on another machine on the segment. Make sure
>you can ping the default gateway.

arp things look ok, but I cannot ping the router, though I can ping any
other host (the same thing I already noticed here at work). But my router at
home complains about this:

arp: ether address is multicast for IP address 192.168.1.4!

.4 is the IP of my notebook. Obviously the ping packets reach the router,
but I don't know what should be wrong with the MAC. The output of ifconfig
looks ok.
I tried diagnosing via tcpdump and noticed a rather strange behaviour on the
notebook (the host with the problem, not the router): Quite often tcpdumps
sees nothing at all, not even the obviously outgoing ping packets. In this
state I cannot interrupt it with CTRL-C. Waiting some time (minutes) lets it
suddenly see the packets, but they still don't get through to ping as
desired.

At home I was able to use nfs with .5 as server. However, I noticed that the
packets are broad-(or multi-?)casted to each and every host in my subnet. I
guess this is closely related to the arp-message above from my router.

I have two further pcmcia-cards in the router (dlink de-660 and dlink
dfe-650) which I took out to try them in the Compaq. The dfe-650 was
recognized as 8 bit ne1000 card and didn't work at all. The de-660 was
recognized correctly and worked fine.

I built an OLDCARD kernel, which was complaining about an interrupt storm on
irq 11 (this is the one all the network cards attached to). It found the
pcmcia-bridge, but didn't find any cards, so there was no network device.

>Somewhere during all of this, you will probably find the broken bit --
>packets missing at some step, the wrong address, or the like. If you find
>anything that isn't fixed via a configuration change (i.e., failed
>checksums, no way to explain the address being put in the packet, etc),
>let us know.

The best thing I can guess here is that 5.3 in contrast to 5.2.1 (all three
cards worked flawlessly with 5.2.1) has some problems dealing with my
hardware. :-)

I'm anything but a network guru and will see if I have some time to dig
further into the packets. Perhaps I can find the broken bit then.

cu
  Gerrit

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• Previous message: Song Du: "Re: IPNAT & IPv6"
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• Reply: Robert Watson: "Re: Strange networking problems after update 5.2.1->5.3"
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