Hello everyone, at last, the strange problems I was having with my Linux box at reboot time is solved. I followed Donald Becker's recommendation about putting "/sbin/ifconfig eth0 down" at the very end of the reboot script and this fixes everything. Now everything is crystal-clear to me.
I agree with Bruce that the Debian distribution should take care of shutting down Ethernet devices before rebooting. As an example, I was getting this error in my desktop machine everytime I rebooted the Linux box: "eth0: Bus master arbitration failure, status 88f2" Since my desktop machine is not a production machine (I am the only one that uses it) and that I first saw this error after a kernel upgrade, I did not waste much time finding the cause. Each time I got that error I just cycled power to the computer and everything worked fine after that. Well, the Ethernet card here is also a NE2100 compatible (it's a BocaLAN Card, using the lance.c driver) and it does DMA. After I put "/sbin/ifconfig eth0 down" at the bottom of /etc/init.d/reboot the problem went away. Beware!!! This problem could happen to you and you'll waste hours trying to find what's wrong. Regards, Eloy.- P.S. Somebody may want to post this to debian-devel@lists.debian.org because I have no posting priviledges there. At 12:46 PM 12/2/96 PST, Bruce Perens wrote: >Here's what Donald Becker had to say about Eloy Paris' problem in which >a network card caused RAM POST failures. This is perhaps something that >we should take care of in the shutdown scripts after NFS partitions are >unmounted and daemons are killed. We can use the output of "netstat -i" >to figure out what interfaces to shut down. > >From: Donald Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >On Sat, 30 Nov 1996, Bruce Perens wrote: >> Eloy Paris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> has a DEC PC that fails >> the RAM POST only when the Boca PCnet32 card is present and a recent >> Linux kernel has just shut down. My uninformed speculation is that the >> card could be doing wild DMA, and I'm wondering if there's any special >> step that should be taken to shut down this card before rebooting. > >That's a common BIOS bug. >The warm boot code should disable the bus-master capability on all cards. > >What is happening is that the card is continuing to receive and store >packets into memory. The work-around, which we must use here as well, is to >put > /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down > /sbin/ifconfig eth1 down > /sbin/ifconfig eth2 down > /sbin/ifconfig eth3 down >in you shutdown script. (Usually /etc/rc.d/rc.6, but Redhat is different.) >This will disable the cards. -- Eloy A. Paris Information Technology Rockwell Automation de Venezuela Telephone: +58-2-9432311 Fax: +58-2-9430323 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]