I have a laptop running opensuse 10.1 x86_64 (a Gateway 7501gx) and a desktop running Window XP connected on a home LAN via an ASDL wireless/Ethernet router.

When both machines are connected to the router via an Ethernet connection, I get very peculiar behavior. When I try to transfer files from the laptop to the windows desktop (>300KB) (via a samba server running of a the laptop or sftp from the Windows machine) the connection between the machines dies and file transfer in not completed. This does not happen for smaller files. I also lose network connectivity (can't even ping the router) on my laptop and I have to restart the network interface .
This happens even though the output of “ifconfig eth0” has not changed and the

I don't have that problem if I am transferring files from the Windows XP to the opensuse laptop.

I not that this has nothing to do with the firewall, as I get the exact same behavior when I turn the firewall off.

The funny thing, is that when laptop is connected to router wireless, I don't have that problem.

I know that is not a router problem as I don't have this problem situation when running my very same laptop on Windows XP.

Please advise.

Maybe the powersaving closes the connection in linux.
So I don't think Samba kills your Ethernet Interface.
When you copy files from OpenSuse to Win what Filesystem do you got on the Windows System?

I got NTFS on the windows system. I do not think power saving is the cause. It only takes a few seconds for the transfer to stall and then my eth0 network interface on my Opensuse laptop dies.

Nothing changes in /etc/resolv.conf and output of ifconfig, router as the same as before I started the transfer, but the eth0 is just not working. I can not ping my router etc...

I first notices this when I was using Samba, but later I discovered that I got the same problem with transferring files from opensuse to windows using sftp.

I also ran ethereal to see what is going on the packet level. I discovered that in either case (samba or sftp) I get a lot of packets that are failed and retransmitted before before eth0 dies.