I'm facing a very annoying problem that I noticed a week from now and for which I can't find an answer: my network suddenly stops responding, usually coming back exactly 25 seconds later. I was using kernel 3.10.4 and now migrated to 3.11-rc4 to see if something changed, but no, the behavior is the same. And since it is a hard to spot problem due to the fact usual web surfing is in "bursts" and the outage is completely random, I can't really tell this problem was present in a previous kernel as well (I always use custom but unpatched kernels from kernel.org, all compiled by myself)
I can't tell the kernel is the culprit either, but I can say there are no clues on the system logs (I checked both /var/log/syslog
and /var/log/messages
and there is nothing unusual there) and that hardware doesn't seem at fault, for the problem shows up using either one of my network cards:
lspci output:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 30)
and I already tried to exchange the ethernet switch ports and still no one else where I work has a problem except me (although we use similar machines, I'm the only one using Linux, so I had to take some infamous jokes about it as well... hehe).
I ran up wireshark on my machine and left it continuously pinging our gateway and another machine on the same network segment. Then, at the first sign of network malfunction I would check it and verify the gateway stopped responding pings, but the other machine was still there responding normally. Some other times is the other machine which stops responding and the gateway is fine, and some other times both stop responding. I don't know what else to do, so I'd like some help or tips on how to further debug this, since the system logs are completely normal.
I have my kernel config file and a capture file from wireshark showing the situation. I can post here or at some pastebin site in case anyone finds it useful to understand the case, just please let me know the detail level I should use (I guess the packet level without the raw data would be enough).