[Soekris] hard reset required on soekris box when connecting via xp (non-html)

[Mike Tancsa]

At 11:24 AM 5/21/2008, Moe Sizlak wrote:
>I will see how it goes over the next few days but note to
>freebsd/monowall/openbsd developers
>the vr driver is *broken* for soekris net5501.
>
>Not all users but certainly enough.

All of the problems I saw were fixed in RELENG_7 of FreeBSD back on April 11th

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/vr/if_vr.c

has the details of all the bugs that were fixed.

There is also a userland work around to the issue (on FreeBSD at 
least) where the driver gets wedged after a media transition.  e.g. 
if someone unplugges an ethernet cable, or the port goes down and up, 
the old driver will often wedge and you need to do an ifconfig 
down;ifconfig up on the NIC to fix it. I have a few releng_6 boxes 
deployed in remote locations I cant safely upgrade where I have a 
script that watches syslog messages and resets the NIC automatically.



#!/bin/sh

#look for the following in kern.* on FreeBSD     vr1: link state changed to UP
#this means the interface state might have bounced, or just come 
up.  On FreeBSD 6.x
#this often results in a wedged NIC, so do an extra down/up and 
generate some traffic


while read LINE
do
TRIG=`echo "$LINE"|awk '/vr.: link state changed to UP/ {where = 
match($0, /vr.:/);if (where) {print substr($0, where, 3)}}'`

if [ -n "$TRIG" ]
then
         echo $TRIG

                 /usr/bin/logger "Resetting due to up/down event $TRIG"
                 sleep 5
                 /sbin/ifconfig $TRIG down
                 /sbin/ifconfig $TRIG up
                  # ping the broadcast address just to generate some 
traffic. This helps as well
                 /sbin/ping -c 1 -t1 -q `/sbin/ifconfig $TRIG |awk 
'/broadcast/ {print $6}'`
                 /usr/bin/logger "$TRIG restart done"
                 TRIG=""
fi
done



In syslog, I have

kern.*                                         | exec 
/usr/local/sbin/interface-check.sh


         ---Mike