[Cialug] Question about Ubuntu

[David Champion]

I'd check ifconfig on both, and iwconfig on the wireless one, and see 
what's up there.

This is a linux box at home that I rebooted a couple of days ago, and 
the 3 carrier errors probably happened when I swapped DSL modems.

$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:A0:CC:60:8C:0E
          inet addr:192.168.1.5  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2a0:ccff:fe60:8c0e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:56425 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:28916 errors:3 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:3
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:3936890 (3.7 MiB)  TX bytes:2124134 (2.0 MiB)
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb800

If you're seeing any significant errors for the wired one, I'd check the 
cables, NIC and switch for issues.

Try the "mii-tool" command and see what it reports:
# mii-tool eth0
eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok

Check dmesg, or rmmod & modprobe (from the console, not remotely of 
course) the module used for the network cards and see if there are any 
errors, or warnings about IRQ's or anything like that.

Also, are you sure the network is configured correctly? Sometimes with 
things like a bad netmask or gateway setting, Linux networking will work 
more or less, but will have odd issues. Been there, done that.

There are a lot of other things you can check, like the routing table, 
arp cache, traceroute, running ping to gather info... google for "linux 
network troubleshooting" and there are a bunch of tips out there. Let us 
know what you find with those things, and we can go from there.

-dc


Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> I have installed Ubuntu on a commodity PC to use as a fileserver in 
> our office. Then I have also helped a friend at work install it on an 
> older PC in his home.
>
> One experience both PC's are having is that the network connections 
> are not very stable. He uses wireless for his PC and he finds that it 
> frequently cannot find the network. He is not used to Linux so he 
> tends to restart the computer to "get the wireless to work again." 
> Needless to say, he is frustrated more with Ubuntu than Windows. He 
> noticed the same kind of network unstability with the Ubuntu computer 
> that is our file server. He noticed that we didn't have a problem with 
> the fileserver when it was running SUSE 9.x, but after I upgraded it 
> to Ubuntu, it was not as reliable. Note: The fileserver is wired, not 
> wireless, so that may be a different problem from what he experiences 
> at home, but he thinks of it as the same problem.
>
> I know that this is a fuzzy way to describe it. My job has changed now 
> to where I don't get into the technical details as much anymore and so 
> I am not as up on things as I would like.
>
> My questions:
>
> 1) What is the best place(s) to start to troubleshoot this kind of 
> problem (both at his home and at the office)?
>
> 2) For the office, would it be better to install something else that 
> would be more focused on fileserving to one Windows PC and 3 Macs? If 
> so, what do you suggest? I have all the data on a separate hard drive 
> so it is no problem to install something different if that is a better 
> solution.
>
> 3) For his home PC, have you experienced this before? He didn't have 
> this problem with Windows, but he did with Ubuntu. I can gather 
> specifics if I know what will help to troubleshoot.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stuart Thiessen
>
>
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