[plug] the GNOME panel that just won't die

[James Devenish]

In message <40D02611.80505 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 06:50:57PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> After a while it suddenly stopped responding over the network. 'ifdown
> eth2; ifup eth2' helped briefly, but then it stopped responding again.
> 'ethtool eth2' reported link was fine, and the interface has a
> statically assigned IP. When the machine started reporting 'no route
> to host' for /some/ packets (completely losing the rest) when pinging
> another machine,

Hmm, interesting. I've encountered a similar-sounding problem with
kernels <2.6. There's a particular machine with Intel EtherExpress Pro
cards (IIRC) that's always given trouble, regardless of kernel version.
Mostly, problems under load (though it doesn't take much to make it act
"heavily loaded", because it's bad at I/O on the whole). Occasionally it
says "too much work" and stops responding on an interface. I can connect
via a different interface, but then TCP connections only last a few
minutes before they stall. I can keep starting new TCP connections for a
while, but eventually the interface will fail like the previous one.
There is certainly some way of temporarily recovering the interfaces
from the console, yet not the existing connections, so it still acts
pretty screwed until rebooted.