I recently built an Ubuntu server for secure FTP transmission. I got it up and running and it works great. I have been testing it over the last couple of days and I started to notice a problem. The network interface sporadically drops without warning.

I thought maybe there was something going on with the firewall, but if I reboot the server, everything resumes as normal for a time. I checked the syslog, but I don't see an error corresponding to the time when the connection dropped.

I have tried to do ifconfig eth0 down and then back up, but that didn't help. This server is running in VMWare. I have installed the VMWare tools, but that didn't seem to affect it. I have another Ubuntu server running on the same VMWare host and I have never had this issue before. Once the machine goes into this state, I cannot connect FTP clients to it, I cannot open any of its shared folders, and I cannot connect to the outside world from the server, but the weird thing is, I can ping the server from other computers on my network.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Ok...it gets even more strange. It just came back by itself. I'm sure it will go back down again soon.

Also, a little more info. I'm using static IP, not DHCP.

More info:

If I use 'ifup' and 'ifdown' instead of 'ifconfig eth0 down' and 'ifconfig eth0 up' it restores the connection.

Has anyone seen anything like this? Do you think it's related to VMWare? The problem with that theory is that I have another Ubuntu server in the same VMWare environment and it has never had this issue.

I have tried everything I know to fix this problem and I have posted in 2 forums with no response.

I'm not the only one having this problem. I found another user with the exact same issue in the Ubuntu forums, but no one had come up with a permanent fix there either.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...32#post7687532

I found that initiating a ping from the machine in question will restore the downed connection, so I used some information from the post above to set up a cron job that sends out one ping every 5 minutes, but this is just a band-aid solution. I won't bump this thread again, but if anyone comes across it, please help me out if you have any ideas. I'm subscribed to the thread...