Guest TiddlyPom Posted November 24, 2005 Report Share Posted November 24, 2005 I have used Mandriva/Mandrake Linux on and off for years (along with other Linux distros) but ever since Mandrake 10.0 came out I cannot use this distribution since networking always locks up on me (and this is across a variety of network cards and different processors/motherboards). If I try and ping anything, I get "buffer full" and although if I leave the O/S alone for a while, networking generally seems to pick up again after a while. This bug seems to exist in all versions of Mandrake/Mandriva after 10.0 including Mandriva 2006. No other Linux distribution that I have used seems to do this (certainly Fedora Core and Ubuntu behave fine on the same (variety of) hardware). This is driving me mad and is preventing me from using Mandriva as my primary operating system which is a shame since the graphical admin tools are excellent and hardware detection seems better than most other distros. Has anybody else experienced this problem? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted November 24, 2005 Report Share Posted November 24, 2005 what type of network card are you using? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest TiddlyPom Posted November 25, 2005 Report Share Posted November 25, 2005 I have had the same problem on a number of different system with different LAN cards. My main PC has an Asrock 939S56-M with a Realtek RTL8201CL ethernet controller. I use an old HP Omnibook 4150b Laptop - 500MHz Pentium 3 with 512Mb RAM as a MIDI station and this has a Xircom Realport cardbus ethernet adaptor in it. (This PC is currently running Fedora Core 3 + CCRMA extensions very successfully). I have a third PC that my (young) children use which is based on a very old QDI Advance 10F (socket 370) motherboard with a 700MHz Celeron, 640Mb RAM and a VIA Rhine based PCI 10/100Mbit ethernet card (although this has since been replaced by an Asus WLAN card supported via ndiswrapper). I have tried various flovours of Mandrake/Mandriva (over 10.0) on each of these and *all* of them have exhibited the network lock-up that I described. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted November 28, 2005 Report Share Posted November 28, 2005 odd...if it's a problem across various adapters and different versions of mandriva i'd normally say something must be up with your network. a few things: 1) Check and make sure zeroconf is not enabled. this should be in the mandrake control center, under networking (i don't recall exactly where ATM). 2) are you using dhcp or static IP's? 3) are you sure this hasn't happened in other distro's? i've never come across this issue before, and the ethernet cards you mentioned should be working it seems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest TiddlyPom Posted November 29, 2005 Report Share Posted November 29, 2005 It isn't unique to my network! I have had the same problems trying this out at work as well on a HP Vectra VE (Pentium III 600MHz with an Intel based LAN card) and that exhibited exactly the same behaviour. I used to use an old Pentium 200 PC with twin LAN cards running Mandrake 9.0 as a firewall/DNS/NAT router when I had a cable modem (this must have been kernel 2.4.x) and this worked fine and *never* locked up. With more modern versions of Mandriva/Mandrake, the machine starts up fine and works but if you *stress* the network at all (e.g. heavy file transfer or multiple TCP/IP downloads) then at some point the network seems to hang with "buffer full" if you try and ping anything (this is with all the zeroconf/howl stuff turned off). I have also seen the same behaviour using one of Thac's multimedia kernels. In many cases, the network seems to recover after a few minutes but I have had to restart xinetd in some cases. In a few cases I have had to reboot the box to get TCP/IP working again. My home LAN has a primary Linux/MythPC server running Fedora Core 4 which has *never* had any LAN problems. I also run FC4 on the laptop as a CCRMA/Music workstation. The other two PCs run Windows XP at the moment but I would like to wean my wife and children off Windows hence the thought of a nice easy-to-use distro such as SuSE or Mandriva (with automounting of flash disks etc like Windows does). Fedora is just too sparten and user unfriendly to be a Windows replacement for my wife I think (although it is absolutely rock stable unlike XP!) I also have a MediaMVP on the LAN and as this clobbers the LAN (in terms of bandwidth usage) and never stutters, I assume that the LAN itself is fine. I am also mystified about the LAN lockups. I can only assume that Mandriva configure TCP/IP buffering stightly differently from other distros hence the problem. I have written Windoze device drivers in the past but have never learnt enough about UNIX/Linux device drivers to be able to have a hack and see if I can find the problem. It's a shame as I like what Mandriva have done with hardware detection and ease of use but cannot proceed unless I know that TCP/IP is stable as I would get the usual "...it never works when I want to use it!" from my other half if I proceeded! My candidates for Linux were Mandriva 2006 Ubuntu 5.10 (or) OpenSuSE 10.0 as the most user friendly Linux distros (with good graphical configuration support). I do confess to leaning towards SuSE at the moment although I do like the look and feel of Mandriva. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted November 29, 2005 Report Share Posted November 29, 2005 Is there anything pertinent from dmesg when the network locks? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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