network cable unplugged

I'm running win xp home with a dial up connection and ics. My lan has 4 other boxes running w98, freebsd, red hat 9, and debian 3.

Yesterday I reinstalled w98 and then realized that the xp box reassigned the ip address; normally these ip's don't change. Even when I installed unix os' on some boxes the ip's weren't changed.

Be that as it may I got a msg on my xp workstation today that one of the network cables was unattached. Of course this wasn't the case, but it turned out that one of the unix boxes (debian) lost connectivity to the network. This was fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling the nic (software only) and then reestablishing the xp box as gateway to the Internet... on the debian box only.

Hope this makes sense to someone, it doesn't really to me and I was looking for some feedback short of the obvious "thank you, it works again ".

Marty

 

Marty - are you hooking to a switch or a hub for the network?

My best guess is that you have your NICs set to autosense speed & duplexing and that one or more of them got confused. Best to lock them to the fastest settings the network will use or, if you are only using the network for ICS/internet, to lock them at a slower speed that any equipment you have will use. Internet is so slow even with broadband that the slowest possible network speed is still way faster.

If you connect using a switch and your NICs are all new enough to only have an RJ-45 plug, then 100Mbps Full-duplex is what you want. If any cards are the older combo cards with 2 or 3 possible ways to connect, then they need to be 10Mbps Half-duplex.

 

Hi Newt,

The two problem nic's are 100mbps while the two that haven't given me any problems are 10mbps. It's also been suggested to me that xp is using dhcp although mostly my ip's have been remaining static.

I never followed it all that closely before though tbh so I'm going to try and keep an eye on it henceforth.

Thanks.

Marty

 

ICS will provide DHCP address assignments if you let it. Under normal circumstances with the machines running all the time or with a long enough lease period for the DHCP-assigned addresses, they will stay the same. I know the various newer Linux distros are supposed to use DHCP correctly but I don't have enough experience to know if this is fact or simply 'supposed to be that way'. And I haven't worked with ICS enough to know how solid it's DHCP is.

Do you have the NICs locked to those speeds or is that what the auto setting is giving?

I wonder since a speed mismatch does give the message that the cable is unplugged. The small SOHO switches don't have the capacity usually to have the switch port speed/duplexing set so all you can do is set the card. High-end switches and you can set the port speed on them as well. I always lock both if possible or NIC at least to remove a possible point of failure for the network.

Since you have trouble with the two faster NICs, you could possibly have some marginal cable. Reducing speed and duplexing on those two shouldn't slow things down too much for you. Big inter-lan file transfers would be quite a bit slower but most things shouldn't be affected enough for you to notice.

With as small a network as you have, setting static IP/netmask/gateway/DNS on the NICs would probably be a good idea just to reduce one more possible point of failure.

 

Newt,

There are five nics and the two that are associated with the recent trouble have been used here for maybe 4 years or so. Yes everything is auto set now that I have them connected to a switch that can run at 100mbps.

Also when I do file transfers and they're large enough I can definitely tell the difference. For instance I run several apache web servers in my office and the htdig intranet search engine; the spider runs for hours because there's lots of documentation on my intranet, books/manuals I've d/l'd etc.. so....

Is there any way for me to look at the internal settings on ICS such as if it's actually using DHCP? It sure looks like it is.

 

Marty - didn't realize you had a serious network although the number of different operating systems should have given me a clue.

I'm not a big fan of ICS for any serious use. It's good for a microsoft applet but like a lot of the ones they have developed, light duty use is what it's aimed at.

I'm still not real sure where your original problem originated. Marginal patch cable maybe or a barking network card. Have to give that some additional thought so I can suggest some testing you can do with utilities you already have.

I still strongly recommend fixing the NIC speeds on all the systems.

I looked around for a hardware internet sharing solution that would use dial-up. Found several that looked good. Pricy though. The SMC Barricade Broadband Router/Switch offers broadband or dial-up. Only good sources seem to be UK though and the device isn't cheap. Might or might not be worth the $150-$180 it would probably cost. The hardware firewalling and some of the other features just might make it worthwhile.

Meanwhile, you might want to switch to using one of your 'Nix boxes to do what ICS is doing now. Good how-to Here. Written for FreeBSD and my guess is that you'll get better results from it than from ICS on the XP PC.

 

Tony,

Wouldn't I see this in the dmesg from the last boot? I don't. Not that I disagree that xp is using dhcp, I'm so new to this don't feel strongly about much of anything right now.

 

Hey Newt,

I wouldn't go so far as to call what I've got in my office a "serious network" although it does aim to be a serious learning and development environment for me.

Right now I'm content to know there's no obvious answer to what happened yesterday and see if it happens again. I've been using ICS with no noticeable problems for about a year now and being a unix newbie am not going to make the changeover w/o good reason.

At the moment it's all one big learning experience for me... an loving it!


Marty