Using a low powered (450Mhz AMD-K6, 256K) Slack 10.2, 2.6.13, box as gateway/firewall. It does run a single KDE session, but activity there is almost zero.

Lately I've been having problems with my cable connection dropping out, at fairly regular intervals, sometimes for only a second, other times longer. I've not been able to tie this down to any particular activity. Running a line test, at DSLReports, gives this. Connecting another machine to the modem has no problems.

ifconfig, for the NIC connected to the modem shows a high number of errors:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:A0:CC:37:4E:AA
inet addr:24.127.xxx.xxx Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.254.0
inet6 addr: fe80::2a0:ccff:xxxx:xxxx/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:20417172 errors:93970 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:140963
TX packets:11336753 errors:5 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:6
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3744265099 (3570.8 Mb) TX bytes:660228862 (629.6 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x6000

Does this look like a dying NIC (Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX [Linksys EtherFast 10/100]), or could there be any kind of mis-configuration that might cause this.

Cheers,
Eddie

might be a dodgey conection on your CAt5 cable (i presume you are conected to the modem via Cat5)... taht can cause unexpected data loss,
I had this problem and it took ma ages to track down as it was intermittent depending on moovement of the network cable...

Naw. One of the 1st things I tried was changing the cable from the modem.

Cheers,
Eddie

Problems solved. Well, at least the ones here. I've still got a random "dropping connection" from my cable connection to deal with.

A new NIC stopped the errors/frame (errors). Then I realised, eventually, that my firewall script was actually doing it's job. It was designed to start, silently, dropping pings if it thought I was being flooded. Guess what, that screws up DSLReports line test, as that relies on lots of pings. Turning off that part of the firewall gave me this. Which, kinda, makes me a happy camper again.

Ah well, off to do battle with the cable guys again.

Cheers,
Eddie