# Downloads freezing on my Linux box but not on others?

## lupestro

Hello all,

I am having a strange problem. At first, I thought it might just be my own impatience but the evidence points to this being quite real.

I have a Windows laptop, a "football" iMac, and my Gentoo server, letting me do development on all three platforms. (I hate to commit to not learning something  :Smile:  ) Some tools (like Eclipse) I use on all three platforms. Perhaps lately, perhaps for quite a while, maybe even from day 1, I've been noticing that when I am in the download stage of updating something on this box, whether it is doing an emerge or an Eclipse update, it will just stop and never come back, even leaving it until the next morning. I just wrote this off to the vicissitudes of the network, but once I started trying to keep all of my copies of Eclipse up to date on a daily or weekly basis, I observed that occasionally one of the other boxes will stop for a few minutes but eventually pick right back up. This one isn't doing that, so I'm thinking maybe there really is some kind of problem. 

Maybe its hardware, some interaction between the system and the Linksys router, but the others are sitting behind the same router - the Mac is wired into the adjacent port and the WinXP PC is going in wireless. Maybe I need to adjust a setting that is automatically adjusted for this sort of thing on the other systems. I don't know where to even begin troubleshooting this one and could use some hints on technique for troubleshooting this kind of networking problem.

The major frustration is that it has become nearly impossible to successfully complete updating much of anything significant for Eclipse because the updates always freeze about halfway through the downloads, almost always on a larger package, and Eclipse's cancel doesn't work very well, so I have to shut down Eclipse and start over. Even doing an emerge --sync may take me three attempts before it finally "takes" - same symptom - and emerges of larger packages will occasionally stall indefinitely and have to be restarted. (This is irritating when I kicked them off before going to the office and find that I need to restart them when I get home.)

My Linux box connects to the network through the Tulip driver, FWIW. (Is there a handy utility to dump a precis of the hardware stats in some way concise enough to drop into a forum?)

Any ideas are welcome.

Lupestro

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## Janne Pikkarainen

What does ifconfig report? Is there collisions / errors present? Please also paste output of ethtool eth0 here. If you don't already have ethtool, emerge it - it's a small package and should not stall in the middle of the download.  :Wink: 

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## lupestro

The following might mean something - no errors and no dropped packets - does txqueuelen look right? MTU?

```
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:30:F1:2D:ED:C5

          inet addr:192.168.15.10  Bcast:192.168.15.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

          RX packets:6631290 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

          TX packets:9516693 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

          RX bytes:2394435877 (2283.5 Mb)  TX bytes:2513766973 (2397.3 Mb)

          Interrupt:185 Base address:0x6c00

```

But the following from ethtool is unfortunately not very helpful. The only thing that said anything at all was -i

```

ethtool eth0

Settings for eth0:

No data available

ethtool -i eth0

driver: tulip

version: 1.1.13-NAPI

firmware-version:

bus-info: 0000:00:0a.0

ethtool -a eth0

Pause parameters for eth0:

Cannot get device pause settings: Operation not supported

ethtool -c eth0

Coalesce parameters for eth0:

Cannot get device coalesce settings: Operation not supported

ethtool -d eth0

Cannot get register dump: Operation not supported

ethtool -e eth0

Cannot get EEPROM data: Operation not supported

ethtool -g eth0

Ring parameters for eth0:

Cannot get device ring settings: Operation not supported

ethtool -k eth0

Offload parameters for eth0:

Cannot get device rx csum settings: Operation not supported

Cannot get device tx csum settings: Operation not supported

Cannot get device scatter-gather settings: Operation not supported

Cannot get device tcp segmentation offload settings: Operation not supported

Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported

no offload info available

ethtool -p eth0

Cannot identify NIC: Operation not supported

ethtool -S eth0

no stats available

ethtool -t eth0

Cannot test: Operation not supported

                                             

```

I had thought I was using ethernet from the motherboard, but apparently it is a card after all:

Accton Technology Corporation EN-1216 Ethernet Adapter (rev 11)

I do remember I had to explicitly adjust the system to load the "tulip" module for it on the weekend that coldplug came into "stable" as my system could no longer auto-recognize it. (I don't set any special tuning parameters for it, if there even are any such.) It is possible that my problems stemmed from this point in time. Googling around, I didn't see any explicit known gotchas for this card, though its nothing to rave about. 

I built the system with cheap but conservative components for the time I built it a couple of years ago - NVidia MX420, SBLive, Athlon XP 1800+ (1.5GHz), 40Gb and 100 Gb hard drives (not 7200 rpm either). The 512 Mb RAM could stand to get bumped up, though. I seldom run anything these days with less than a gig. Mostly it serves files and email when I'm not doing Linux development on it. But I don't see anything in that to explain the ethernet behavior.

What should I look at next?

Lupestro

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