On 12/10/2007, Christian Plattner  wrote:

quoted text
> Hi,

>

> Today something strange happened on one of my Soekris 5501 boxes,

> it runs OpenBSD 4.1-stable. The box is connected with a cross-over cable

> to another machine via the vr1 interface (the box has 4 vr interfaces).

>

> Problem: After having rebooted the machine at the other end of the cable

> multiple times, the Soekris box suddenly stopped receiving packets on

> the vr1 interface.

>

> After playing around with ping and tcpdump on both sides I found out

> that the vr1 interface allowed me to send packets, but incoming packets

> did no show up in tcpdump, even though the LED on the interface was

> flickering.

>

> I changed the cable, connected the vr1 of the Soekris to another

> machine, then to a switch port with lots of broadcast traffic etc.etc.

> nothing helped, ingress traffic on vr1 did not show up in tcpdump.

>

> Solution: Finally, immediatelly after doing "ifconfig vr1 down &&

> ifconfig vr1 up" everything worked again as normal.

>

> The link on vr1 is currently only used to do SSH between the two

> machines, so this is really a low traffic link. On the other hand,

> vr0,vr2,vr3 are heavily used (BGP sessions etc., the Soekris is at the

> border of my AS). btw: the machine at the other end of the cable is a

> Soekris 5501 as well. Had to reboot it to perform a BIOS upgrade.

>

> No suspicious output in dmesg.

>

> Any ideas on how I could further track down the problem?

>

> Thanks,

>   Christian

>

> The vr interfaces in dmesg:

>

> vr0 at pci0 dev 6 function 0 "VIA VT6105M RhineIII" rev 0x96: irq 11,

> address 00:00:24:c8:de:68

> ukphy0 at vr0 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI

> 0x004063, model 0x0034

> vr1 at pci0 dev 7 function 0 "VIA VT6105M RhineIII" rev 0x96: irq 5,

> address 00:00:24:c8:de:69

> ukphy1 at vr1 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI

> 0x004063, model 0x0034

> vr2 at pci0 dev 8 function 0 "VIA VT6105M RhineIII" rev 0x96: irq 9,

> address 00:00:24:c8:de:6a

> ukphy2 at vr2 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI

> 0x004063, model 0x0034

> vr3 at pci0 dev 9 function 0 "VIA VT6105M RhineIII" rev 0x96: irq 12,

> address 00:00:24:c8:de:6b

> ukphy3 at vr3 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI

> 0x004063, model 0x0034

>

> # ifconfig vr1

>

> vr1: flags=8843 mtu 1500

>          lladdr 00:00:24:c8:de:69

>          media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)

>          status: active

>          inet XX.XX.XX.XX netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast XX.XX.XX.YY

>          inet6 fe80::200:24ff:fec8:de69%vr1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2

Not sure if related, but something similar has been fixed in

4.2-current already.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-August/076486.html

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/pci/if_vr.c#rev1.70
I think you should be able to safely apply the 1.69 to 1.70 diff to

your source tree if this is of a concern. The diff is for vr_attach()

only, so if your system is already up and running and you never reboot

it, then you probably shouldn't bother until your next upgrade.
Cheers,

Constantine.