[Soekris] hard reset required on soekris box when

[Moe Sizlak]

>From what you are saying below this certainly mirrors my experience.

I will try a supported NIC on the pci port of the soekris box and use
 that for connection to the XP box.

If there are driver issues that should hopefully provide a workaround.






------------------------
From: Stuart Henderson <stu at spacehopper.org>
Subject: Re: [Soekris] hard reset required on soekris box when
       connecting      via xp (non-html)
To: soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
Message-ID: <slrng2vtk0.b4s.stu at pyxis.spacehopper.org>

On 2008-05-18, Moe Sizlak <sizlak1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I have had a net5501 running monowall 1.3b11 for about a month now
> but find that most days after cold booting my XP box I need to hard reset
> my soekris box to connect.

This is almost certainly an interaction between the vr(4) driver
and the NIC in the 5501 (it also affects the PCEngines alix but not
most other supported chips). If you can connect from another machine
and force it to disable/re-enable the interface (or force the media
type to change) it should come back up without rebooting.

I believe I noticed it happening more often when using the auto-
crossover (i.e. connecting to a PC using a straight cable).

When certain devices are plugged into the NIC first (e.g.
Thinkpad X40) it stops this problem from happening (i.e. plug
in a good device, then replace with one that normally has the
problem, then the problem won't occur).

...so you might try plugging the linux box into the port for
the XP box when it first boots, then change it over.

The other way is to plug in a switch that stays powered-up, since
this behaviour is associated with losing link to the nic.

It's meant to be working ok in the newer vr(4) driver on FreeBSD 7+
(m0n0wall is based on older FreeBSD 6.3), but as far as I'm aware
the relevant part to fix just this problem hasn't been isolated
from the huge number of changes (both style and code) in the same
commit.

This definitely also affects OpenBSD, it looks like also NetBSD
and DragonFlyBSD as well as FreeBSD <=6..