[CS-FSLUG] MDK10 troubles...

[David Aikema]

I've been doing a little bit of experimenting with Mandrake 10.0 Official 
lately, and have stumbled across some rather weird issues, that seemed to 
result in intermittent network problems.

My network card has been well-supported in all previous distributions that I 
have tried to get it working with, although none of these have involved the 
2.6 kernel.

Anyways, originally network hotplugging (what's that anyways? ... removable 
NICS?) was turned on resulting in the following bit being spit out 
in /var/log/messages:
---
Apr 29 16:37:35 delta ifplugd(eth0)[1072]: ifplugd 0.21b initializing.
Apr 29 16:37:35 delta ifplugd(eth0)[1072]: Using interface 
eth0/00:C0:49:B5:23:7
2 with driver <tulip> (version: 1.1.13)
Apr 29 16:37:35 delta ifplugd(eth0)[1072]: Using detection mode: SIOCGMIIPHY
Apr 29 16:37:35 delta ifplugd(eth0)[1072]: Initialization complete, link beat 
no
t detected.
Apr 29 16:37:35 delta network: Bringing up interface eth0:  failed
---
Anways, I turned off hotplugging and that bit vanished.

There were (and still are) a few errors being spit out by ifdown (although 
nothing from ifup):
---
[root at delta root]# ifdown eth0
RTNETLINK answers: No such device or address
RTNETLINK answers: No such device or address
[root at delta root]# ifup eth0
Determining IP information for eth0... done.
---

If I were to attempt to ping I would always end up with the following message 
(the routing table was configured properly):
---
[root at delta root]# ping www.yahoo.com
connect: Resource temporarily unavailable
---

I think the functionality of the network is best exemplified with the 
following blurb.  At elast here, the fourth try was the charm:
---
[root at delta root]# wget http://www.yahoo.com
--18:11:33--  http://www.yahoo.com/
           => `index.html'
Resolving www.yahoo.com... 66.94.230.35, 66.94.230.37, 66.94.230.32, ...
Connecting to www.yahoo.com[66.94.230.35]:80... failed: Resource temporarily 
unavailable.
Connecting to www.yahoo.com[66.94.230.37]:80... failed: Resource temporarily 
unavailable.
Connecting to www.yahoo.com[66.94.230.32]:80... failed: Resource temporarily 
unavailable.
Connecting to www.yahoo.com[66.94.230.38]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKhttp://www.rotundus.com/
Length: unspecified [text/html]

    [  <=>                                ] 30,576        97.33K/s

18:11:34 (97.02 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [30576]
---

Anyways, after this (as there has been some mention of the tulip driver that 
the card uses in the recent kernel changelog, I decided to try a 2.4 kernel, 
which worked properly, although I had some issues getting the NVIDIA drivers 
working there.

After this point, I booted back in to kernel 2.6.  Strangely, it appears that 
I'm not getting all these network failures, although ifdown still does spit 
out the same errors as before.  Although in the past year I've adopted 
Mandrake for home usage, I've always found that Mandrake makes Linux seems 
like Windows in some not-so-enjoyable ways.

David