Network outage with FC6 and sky2 driver

[Brian]

> Brian wrote on Fri, May 18 2007 at 13:44 (-0400):
>  
> > I did this but the nVidia interface is not working. It comes up and 
> > shows activity (Rx/Tx counters increase) but I cannot ping 
> any host on my network.
> > Moving the cable / configuration back to the sky2 interface and 
> > everything works (except, the sky2 driver problem)
> 
> This sounds like the very same problem I had with my onboard 
> network chip:
> counters increase, but no pings.  Unfortunately, the only 
> solution I found was using an external network card.  Sorry I 
> can't help any more.
> 
> Andreas.
> 
> --
> http://www.lysium.de/blog
> 

Seems this problem resolved itself overnight. I rebooted the system a few
times yesterday but the nVidia interface continually failed pings. I woke up
this morning with a dead sky2 driver after attempting a backup, rebooted to
clear and my nVidia interface started working. Go figure! The backup is
chugging along nicely with the nVidia Ethernet controller. No more dead sky2
interface. Next I'll try the sk98lin driver moving the same large amount of
data. 

After a few reboots yesterday, I had to clear the CMOS as my motherboard
wouldn't POST?!? The nVidia interface still didn't work after I did this
though. I suspect a hardware problem with the motherboard as I changed
nothing and don't know why THIS particular reboot fixed things and not the
5+ others from yesterday. The board/CPU is not overheating (according to
lm_sensors) so I'm a wee bit confused what's going on.

Given this, I would recommend to stay away from the Asus A8N32-SLI (socket
939) board. I'm not happy with a few PCI slots that are unusable due to it's
SLI layout, the Maxell Gigabyte Ethernet controller and the erratic behavior
I've witnessed. Hope the Opteron 170 doesn't shake things up even more.. :) 

Another question: 

My system seems to be ignoring the alias declarations in modprobe.conf. I
have alias eth1 forcedeth and alias eth0 sky2 but the interfaces are coming
up the opposite order. Any idea why? This is an up-to-date FC6 build with
MythTV the only non-standard software installed from a different repository.


Thanks,
-Brian