I have a NIC installed using the Realtek 8193 chipset. I use the module 8139too for it, and it works fine, except for one thing:

Whenever a client connects to it the server it is installed in freezes, totally; I have to press the reset button to make it work again.

It works fine as long as nothing is connected to it. I have no idea what is causing it. As you can imagine, it is causing quite a bit of trouble.

Thanks in advance for any help .

EDIT: This is in Knoppix 3.6, by the way.

If you have determined that this is NOT a hardware problem, can you say how you have done this? If not, I'd try a different NIC before doing anything else. This is just a gut feeling but I doubt the driver has a bug (unless you running an unstable build). It seems unlikely that -- if the wrong driver is loading -- that it would work fine until someone connects.

Still ... are you saying that you''ve connected to somewhere on the other side of the NIC, as a client, and there is no problem? If so, I lean towards a hardware fault.

I haven't determined it is a hardware problem, I'm just fairly sure that it's not as it is brand new and I was ultra careful installing it. I don't have any other NICs in the house and have no geeky friends who I might nick one off.

How do you mean, on the other side of the NIC? I can connect to it, and it works fine (a little slow maybe) but then the server freezes. Apart from the hang it all works fine.

I can connect to the wireless NIC in the server just fine.

I'll load up a Kanotix live CD on it, that has ultimate hardware detection, and see if that works any better.

Hmm...upon further investigation, I've found the server will only freeze when serving internet to a client. via IP masquerading. If the client just connects to the server and doesn't try to load anything from the internet the server won't freeze.

Also, if I put down wlan0 before the client is connected and requesting web pages it takes longer for the server to freeze, about 7 minutes instead of about 3.

I didn't realize it was a wireless card. I'm not certain I'm following you with respect to the client. Masquerading comes into play if you are forwarding your LAN packets to the WANInternet but should not effect incoming clients. However, if an incoming client was trying to hijack a session that belongs to a host inside your LAN, the Masquerading would come into play because incoming packets wold be getting tracked by the Masquerading.

I know what I'm trying to say but it might be a good idea for me to go to sleep before a try again :-) Then again, maybe you aren't using a wireless card and the trouble occurs because you are referring to a wireless alias... :-0)

Heh...no, my server has both a wireless card (using ndiswrapper for driver) and an ethernet card. What I'm saying is that when a client connects via wireless capabilities the server doesn't crash, it works perfectly, even with masquerading. This is what I've done till now.

But then I install Mandrake 10 which doesn't support the wireless card in my laptop so I started using the wired network instead. I can transfer files between the laptop and server fine but if it tries to connect to the internet then the server freezes.

I'm not totally sure about this...but I think the server only crashes if the client is requesting fairly large amounts of data from the internet; if I have about 9 tabs open in mozilla and on the wired ethernet then the server will crash, but if I only have 1, fairly lite page like Google then it generally won't crash.

Umm...I'm no quite understanding what you're saying. I've only been using Linux for a few months so I'm a bit of a newbie.

It's a very small network, usually only my server and my laptop, with either the wireless or a crossover cable, if that is important.