[Sheflug] Fun networking problem :)

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

Here's one to tax your minds :)

I've got hold of an ISA 3com Etherlink III, which uses the 3c509 driver in 
Linux. I've disabled PnP, and plonked it on IRQ 7, IO 330. So far so good.

Driver loads happily, and it reports the MAC, IRQ, port, and the fact that Mr 
Becker wrote it...all fine and dandy.

Give it an IP address - 192.168.5.10 ... so far so good :)

Give a machine on the other end of some thinwire ethernet an address of 
192.168.5.5. This other machine is a Sun SPARC IPC running OpenBSD 2.3.

Unfortunatly, something somewhere is scribbling around my ARP 
packets...kicking a ping from Linux to Sparc gives, according to TCP dump, on 
the linux end:

	22:37:37.410615 arp who-has 192.168.5.5 tell 192.168.5.10

*But* at the BSD end:

	<random timestamp> arp who-has 192.168.5.5 tell 5.10.192.168

Which made me go "huh?". The Sparc's network is fine - if I set it's IP back 
to 192.168.4.5, and shift the ethernet cable back to my cheap nasty Realtek 
PCI NE2000 clone and set pings off, all is good. The 3com also works 
correctly under Win95. So something, somewhere, in the 3com driver maybe, is 
screwing up the ARP packets so nothing ever gets back.

Has anyone come across this (and know of a way to fix it?) I'm googling at 
the moment, see what I can find...I'm running kernel 2.2.14, and I've been 
quite happy with it, but if upgrading's the only way to fix this, then bugger 
- guess I'll have to.

Chris...now hunting 3rd machine to stick in middle of network...

-- 
Chris Johnson            \  "If not for me then, do it for yourself. If not
sixie@nccnet.co.uk        \  for then do it for the world." -- Stevie Nicks
www.nccnet.co.uk/~sixie/   ~---------------------------------------+
Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000   \______


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