ie0: lost interrupt: resetting

[Charles Anderson]

rudolf at oce.orst.edu (Jim Rudolf):
> We have two 3/280 servers running SunOS 3.5.  Almost on a weekly basis,
> usually during a period of moderate net activity, one of the servers will
> start spewing forth with: 
> 	ie0:  lost interrupt: resetting
> 
> Our ethernet boards must not have read the man pages, because the affected
> board does not recover by itself.  When this happens, the server is pretty
> much hung up, and the only effective solution we've come up with is the
> dreaded L1-A.  Who else has experienced this?  What did you do to stop it?

I saw this on some 3/160's running SunOS 3.4 (I think).  It was happening
multiple times per day on each file server (of course it started on
Thanksgiving, and I had to come in all weekend to reboot machines). We
eventually tracked the problem down to a faulty, pre-802.3 transciever on
the net that was wrting packets that were all 1's (0xFFFFFFF...).

We were fortunate in a number of ways: we had a network analyzer, the
problem was happening frequently (up to 20% of the packets on the net were
errors), and we could divide and conquer our net without stepping on too
many users' toes.  Please pardon the following plug... I highly recommend
Exelan's network analyzer, LANalyzer EX 5000.  It's extremely valuable for
these kinds of problems.

Charles.
{sun, amdahl, ucbvax, pyramid, uunet}!unisoft!cander