RE: [9fans] stats: ethererr

RE: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Dean Ash]

cool, now I have a beginning. driver I don't know about that one. P9
recognizes the card (I'm told it's a 3COM 905, have to verify that). Card is
a distinct possibility, linux didn't work with it either, which I'd say is
weird with a 3COM card. Wire, maybe the one coming out of the computer is
bad but I'm almost 80% sure the port that connects P9 to the rest of the
network is bad. Well I'll have to do some futzing around this weekend if
time permits. Thanks for the help. Great website by the way Boyd. I just got
done going through it, very humorous.

Dean

-----Original Message-----
From: Boyd Roberts [mailto:boyd@fr.inter.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 3:58 PM
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr


i shall try and resurrect my badly banged around neurons after my
göteborg trip, so here goes:

> >> - crc means your packets are trashed when they get received

each ethernet packet has a 16 bit crc.  it 'ensures' that it got
received ok, but that's a lie.  talk to Sun about UDP checksums...

so on the rx and tx sides the crc's have to be done right.

> Received by whom or what? the DHCP server? or my p9 machine? if it's my
> machine doing the trashing is there a way to fix it? if they're getting
> trashed by the dhcp server what can I do to fix that, especially since I
> have to go through a network admin =)

this has nothing to do with DHCP.  these is the physical bits on the wire
[ethernet].
DHCP is a coupla layers up.  you have wire/card/driver problems.

the framing is to do with the pre/post-able bits that are there to ensure
collisions based on speed of light / velocity factor propagation.  well,
maybe i really mean that the coax/utp needs to be modulated in the right
way at the right time.

> The other stuff was greek to me. Tx, rx? what is that apparently I need to
> read a book on basic networking and ethernet cards.

tx = transmit
rx = receive

de f/vk2bhr ...

Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Boyd Roberts]

> cool, now I have a beginning. driver I don't know about that one. P9
> recognizes the card (I'm told it's a 3COM 905, have to verify that).

if it's a 3C509 it should just work.

Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Boyd Roberts wrote:
> > cool, now I have a beginning. driver I don't know about that one. P9
> > recognizes the card (I'm told it's a 3COM 905, have to verify that).
> if it's a 3C509 it should just work.

The 3C509 was an ISA card..  There are several flavors of 3C905,
the -C-TXM variant of which includes support for remote management.
I think there was a problem with this variant in earlier releases
of Plan 9 but that it is supposed to be fixed in the latest.  (I
haven't tried it again, yet.)

RE: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Dean Ash]

yep on the boot floppy it's listed as elnk3 which I'm fairly sure matches
the 10mps card listed on ibms website that more than likely came with this
machine.

Problem is that now I'm back to where I was before. I plugged my p9 machine
into a good port, tested my cable to the port from my computer (it's ok) and
tried DHCP again. (ip/ipconfig -DG) this time in stats I got in: 120 out:
113 with all other rows being 0 so no errs as far as p9 is concerned. 

Possibly related under /srv/dns.txt the only line in there says read error
in Buffer.load. Again I'm ignorant.

at this point I can only think that it's the driver or the card. neither of
which do I know how to diagnose.

*sigh* since I've been going at this for a few weeks and ,with the exception
of today's irreproducible error, haven't made any progress I think it might
be time to give up on my dream of using plan 9 here at work. I just don't
know enough to intelligently debug the situation. :-( 


but then again maybe I'll come back at it again tomorrow. gotta do some work
now =)

thanks for your help

Dean
-----Original Message-----
From: Boyd Roberts [mailto:boyd@fr.inter.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 5:01 PM
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr


> cool, now I have a beginning. driver I don't know about that one. P9
> recognizes the card (I'm told it's a 3COM 905, have to verify that).

if it's a 3C509 it should just work.

Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Boyd Roberts]

i shall try and resurrect my badly banged around neurons after my
göteborg trip, so here goes:

> >> - crc means your packets are trashed when they get received

each ethernet packet has a 16 bit crc.  it 'ensures' that it got
received ok, but that's a lie.  talk to Sun about UDP checksums...

so on the rx and tx sides the crc's have to be done right.

> Received by whom or what? the DHCP server? or my p9 machine? if it's my
> machine doing the trashing is there a way to fix it? if they're getting
> trashed by the dhcp server what can I do to fix that, especially since I
> have to go through a network admin =)

this has nothing to do with DHCP.  these is the physical bits on the wire [ethernet].
DHCP is a coupla layers up.  you have wire/card/driver problems.

the framing is to do with the pre/post-able bits that are there to ensure
collisions based on speed of light / velocity factor propagation.  well,
maybe i really mean that the coax/utp needs to be modulated in the right
way at the right time.

> The other stuff was greek to me. Tx, rx? what is that apparently I need to
> read a book on basic networking and ethernet cards.

tx = transmit
rx = receive

de f/vk2bhr ...

RE: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Dean Ash]

>> - crc means your packets are trashed when they get received
Received by whom or what? the DHCP server? or my p9 machine? if it's my
machine doing the trashing is there a way to fix it? if they're getting
trashed by the dhcp server what can I do to fix that, especially since I
have to go through a network admin =)

The other stuff was greek to me. Tx, rx? what is that apparently I need to
read a book on basic networking and ethernet cards.

Thanks for the info though. Maybe this is related to my ip/ipconfig not
actually printing anything in debug mode. although that sounds like a leap
so I'm sure it's unrelated.

-----Original Message-----
From: Boyd Roberts [mailto:boyd@fr.inter.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 3:23 PM
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr


From: "Dean Ash" <Dean.Ash@Ingenix.com>
>
> in:61
> out: 54
> crc errs: 21
> overflows: 0
> soft overflows: 0
> framing errs: 34
> buffer errs: 36
> outputs errs: 0
> prom: 0
> addr: 00010266eff9
> 
> Can anyone tell me what this means? I'm guessing that the addr is the
> physical address of my ethernet card but I'm probably wrong.

oh, that is bad.  heaps of crc, framing and buffer errors -- real bad.

iirc:

   - crc means your packets are trashed when they get received
   - framing could be on the tx or the rx side (i forget)
   - buffer prolly indicates memory problems on the tx or rx side

the addr has 48 bits so it's the MAC address.

Re: [9fans] stats: ethererr

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Dean Ash" <Dean.Ash@Ingenix.com>
>
> in:61
> out: 54
> crc errs: 21
> overflows: 0
> soft overflows: 0
> framing errs: 34
> buffer errs: 36
> outputs errs: 0
> prom: 0
> addr: 00010266eff9
> 
> Can anyone tell me what this means? I'm guessing that the addr is the
> physical address of my ethernet card but I'm probably wrong.

oh, that is bad.  heaps of crc, framing and buffer errors -- real bad.

iirc:

   - crc means your packets are trashed when they get received
   - framing could be on the tx or the rx side (i forget)
   - buffer prolly indicates memory problems on the tx or rx side

the addr has 48 bits so it's the MAC address.

[9fans] stats: ethererr

[Dean Ash]

my stats display has ethererr completely filled up. Not good. I looked in
the man page and it doesn't tell me what ethererr signifys. So I went to
/net/ether0/0/stats since that directory is in the man pages and this is
what I found:

in:61
out: 54
crc errs: 21
overflows: 0
soft overflows: 0
framing errs: 34
buffer errs: 36
outputs errs: 0
prom: 0
addr: 00010266eff9

Can anyone tell me what this means? I'm guessing that the addr is the
physical address of my ethernet card but I'm probably wrong.

ip/ipconfig -DG still doesn't print any debug info and my timeout/error
message is still 
ip/ipconfig: no success with DHCP

I'm on an ethernet that uses tcp/ip and gets ip addresses using DHCP.
connected to this network are mostly Win NT machines. so maybe the machine
dishing out the ip addresses is an NT machine also I'll have to check, don't
really know if that makes a difference or not.

One thing I have discovered, by plugging in my NT machine into the ethernet
port I'm using for my p9 machine, is that my NT machine can't get an address
using that port so I'm guessing it's either broken or turned off somehow.
While plugged into the questionable port I get this error:
A domain controller for your domain could not be contacted.
You have been logged on using cached account information.
Changes to your profile since you last logged on may not be available.

click ok, and then I find that the microsoft exchange server can't be found
and no internet. all of which I kind of figured after seeing that error
message.

again though my primary question (if there was really one in this message)
is what are the errors in /net/ether0/0/stats telling me. I need this info
so I can finally solve this network junk and get hooked up to my network.

thanks for your help

Dean