Strange Network behaviour

[Hermann Gottschalk <hg@ostc.de>]

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Hi,
following Situation:

4 Servers 
involved Hardware:
  - Motherboard: MSI MS-6728 
  - Onboard Gigabit NetworkInterface: Intel 82562EZ (e1000)
  - 100 MBit NetworkInterface: D-Link DFE-530TX (via-rhine)

Connected through a 1GB-Switch and a 100MBit-Switch. The second
connects about 40 X-Terminals too.

On all Servers is a SuSE Linux 9.0 professional installed; online
updates every night.  When they start up, everything is fine. After
some hours when i want to do a tcpdump on one of the Interfaces i get:

'tcpdump: socket: Address family not supported by protocol'  

ethereal doesn't find any interface.

Sometimes some of the 100MBit-IFs didn't answer anymore. The only
cure was to reboot. Neither rcnetwork restart nore unloading the
network-module did help.

This happend for a long time until there was a kernel patch from
2.4.21-215 to 2.4.21-266. Since it is installed this error doesn't
appear anymore.

On my home-system with a sis900 NW-IF the same happend once. But
there too is kernel 2.4.21-266 now.

Does someone has have made the same experience or does someone has
an idea what was the reason.

Thanks for any ideas in advance

Greetings
Hermann

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