Gentoo Box Drops Off Network (Long)

[Steven Elling]

On Thursday 01 May 2003 10:04, Gerald Combs wrote:
> Overruns indicate that data is arriving from the network before it can be
> moved into your computer's memory.  This can be caused by a bad driver, a
> crappy chipset (e.g. the RealTek 8139), or both.  (It can also be caused
> by your card being "faster" than the computer, but I'm assuming you're
> not running GigE or 100 Mbps Ethernet on a 486.)  If too many errors or
> overruns accumulate over a given period of time, the card or driver may
> drop off the network temporarily.
>
> What chipset and driver are you running?  You indicate that it ran fine
> under Debian; you might compare that driver and version to the one you're
> using now.  You could also emerge the "mii-diag" package; it can give you
> more information than you ever wanted about your Ethernet card.

The network card is a Linksys LNE100TX running at 100 Mbps full-duplex and 
dmesg shows the chipset as an ADMtek Comet rev 17.  I am using the tulip 
driver and it is built into the kernel.  The system has an AMD Athlon Tbird 
running at 900 MHz so I doubt the system is too slow.

The first time I ran miii-diag it showed the following:

Using the default interface 'eth0'.
Basic registers of MII PHY #1:  3100 7869 001d 2411 05e1 41e1 0007 2001.
 The autonegotiated capability is 01e0.
The autonegotiated media type is 100baseTx-FD.
 Basic mode control register 0x3100: Auto-negotiation enabled.
 Basic mode status register 0x7869 ... 786d.
   Link status: previously broken, but now reestablished.
 Your link partner advertised 41e1: 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx 10baseT-FD 
10baseT.
   End of basic transceiver information.
----------

The network card is set to auto-negotiation and mii-diag reported the link 
as "previously broken, but now reestablished."  Do you think that because 
the network card is set to auto-negotiation it is breaking the network 
connection and trying to renegotiate the media type and speed thereby 
causing the RX errors and overruns?