I'm being driven to distraction by netdev watchdog timeout messages from a second ethernet card which is only connected to anything part of the time and I want to know how to turn them off !!!!

I have "googled" till I'm blue in the face but all I see there are discussions from people who have problems connecting to the network at all for one reason or another.

So here's the situation.

I have a linux-from-scratch system and am well into the "beyond linux from scratch" stage. It's using 2.4.20 kernels but that's probably not too important. It has two Kingston ISA ne2000 clones, each configured to a different io and irq. I have used the approach documented in the Ethernet-HOWTO where you set up alias and options lines for each card in /etc/modules.conf.

I can see all the machines on my network, and I can see the net through the "internet connection sharing" feature on the windoze box that drives my adsl modem. Naturally I'd have the adsl modem directly onto the linux box if there was a driver for it :-(

The second ethernet card is used with a "crossover" cable to connect laptops to my linux box.

Everything works. However, last week installed samba and the nmbd daemon. ever since then the box has been outputting annoying messages at intervals to the console and in the message buffer output from "dmesg"

On the console you see

NETDEV WATCHDOG eth1 transmit timed out

dmesg shows that message plus the following

"eth1: transmit timed out : cable problem ? xxx yyy "

Now of course, whatever is outputting this is absolutely right, there is a "cable problem" because that particular port has nothing in it at the moment. My problem is that things are only connected to this port from time to time and this message is driving me nuts.

As this has only happenned since I installed the samba and nmbd server, I guess those are trying to probe for machines on the eth1 network card, and that's the reason for the messages. My question is, how do I turn them off ? I can't see anything in the beyond linux from scratch documents that helps me, but then again I might be staring right at the answer in the book and not realising it ! I'd put a "smilie" in here but there doesn't seem to be one for a guy ripping his hair out in lumps !

cheers
John V

sounds like nmbd traffic, trying to announce it's netbios name to your network and, obviously, failing. best bet is to disable smb/cifs over this interface (and maybe restart it if the laptop needs smb).

search for bind interfaces only in smb.conf(5) man file. I haven't used it myself but it sounds like that is what you need

if you do need smb for the laptop create a new conf file with the appropriate settings to allow both interfaces (i am probably telling you how to suck eggs here, so i will leave it at that, if not repost and I will continute :-))

rich