A ping question and the infamous "sendto: No buffer space available" message

[Craig Leres]

Ralph Yozzo writes:
> Has anyone run into a situation where "ping'ing" a host
> gives a
>
> sendto:No buffer space available
>
> message.

Yeah, the usual cause of this is that a directly connected network is
hosed. There's a limit to the number of packets that you can queue to
the interface (usually 50) and once you reach this limit, you may not
queue any more and the No buffer space available error (ENOBUFS) is
returned.

> The only solution that I found is to reboot the machine.
> Needless to say, the administration people are not to
> thrilled with my constant rebooting.

I'll bet! Rebooting should be saved for the last resort. It's possible
that your hardware is broken or flakey. Sometimes you can reset it
without doing anything with software. Sometimes, you can reset the
hardware by ifconfig'ing the interface down and then back up. Of
course, if the problem is that your device driver is broken (maybe it's
doing something like dropping an interrupt) you're probably stuck with
rebooting until you fix the driver.

		Craig