eth0 drops connection intermittently
 

I have a small issue with a RedHat 8.0 box. The ethernet connection intermittently terminates itself and then comes back up on its on. Output from ifconfig is below:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr *MAC Address*
inet addr:10.1.2.230 Bcast:10.1.2.255 Mask:255.255.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1719778 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4641 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:144065877 (137.3 Mb) TX bytes:1240336 (1.1 Mb)
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xb000

eth0:1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr *MAC Address*
inet addr:10.1.2.231 Bcast:10.1.2.255 Mask:255.255.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xb000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:524 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:524 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:62003 (60.5 Kb) TX bytes:62003 (60.5 Kb)

route -n output below:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
10.1.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 10.1.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
0.0.0.0 10.1.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
0.0.0.0 10.1.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 1 0 0 eth0

Also when this occurs the other machines on the network can't ping this box(of course) and this box can't ping any other machine on the same network. This box can however ping the loopback and the ip address configured on the eth0 and eth0:1 interfaces.

service network restart has no effect but restarting the box will correct the error until it occurs again.

Also occasionally I see spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7 error message and have read posts on this and can't find anything that explains the error. All research done on this error message says that it is irrelevant as the machine continues to run.

Any help would be appreciated...:scratch:

Do you have a firewall running? If so I would try restarting the firewall to see if this may be the problem.

IPtables is set to be off in all runlevels and the box is behind a cisco PIX firewall but all other machines(windows) behind this firewall do not have any problems of this type. When this occurs I can't even ping the Linux machine from inside the firewall its almost like IPTables enabled itself and locked down all ports but if I go to the box and view the iptables config there are no rules set to be executed...

Check the cable connections. On my son's box inside my home n/w he was getting disconnected periodically and the cause appeared to be that when his box got too warm, the socket expanded more than the rj-45 plug at hsi NIC. The solution was to shield the box from a nearby furnace vent. :rolleyes

Does anyone know how to disable the console blanking feature? I have shutdown the apmd service in all runlevels and have set a script to run at startup that includes setterm -blank 0, setterm -powersave off, and setterm -powerdown 0, but the terminal window blanking still occurs after the machine has been u pand inactive for about an hour. I'm not sure if this is a bug or not but the ethernet connection seems to drop each time the console goes blank...:scratch:

If anyone knows of a way to turn off console blanking I would like to try that to see if it is the cause of this issue b/c it is the only thing that I can link to the error currently. There are no messages in any of the logs that reference the network connection or any of the ethernet adapters.

I think I figured out what was going on here....
I set up a monitoring tool to ping the server every 5 minutes and the link has not been down since. I guess it was just shutting itself off after a long period of inactivity. It is working now but if there is another way around this I would love to know.