We are facing to the problem of LAN interface on Linux

[idata]

Hi everbody,

My name is Michael from NTT Communications.

If you know someting information to my problem, please let me know.

Our project team developed a private firewall from Miracle Linux with custmising IPTables on the number of about 1700 NEC Express 5800 PC Server and FT Server last year.

We delivered this to the about 1700 points in Japan.

We have to controll LAN side interface (as eth0 on Linux) by scheduling application, so should be down LAN side interface at the time and after should be up LAN side interface at another time by requesting from user.

We use the 'ifconfig eth0 down/up' command for this task.

Someday, we scheduled all of firewalls as be downed eth0 at 2AM JST and upped eth0 at 6AM JST.

A Interface down process was going nomal on all of the firewalls but a interface up process was not going nomal on some firewalls.

So the 'ifconfig eth0 down' was performed good but the 'ifconfig eth0 up' was performed not good.

We seemed the eth0 interface is nomal starting up after performing the 'ifconfig eth0 up', because we could see good status (=Link is UP) from performing the 'ifconfg eth0' and 'ethtool eth0'.

But those firewall could got packets from eth0 but could not send only one packet.

We have been resolving this for few months, but we can not resolve this.

We found a difference in case of nomal and another as show bellow.

In case of normal:

We found 'Link become ready" messages after massaging "Link is not ready" at starting up eth0 interface in syslog.

In case of failure:

We could not found 'Link become ready" messages after massaging "Link is not ready" at starting up eth0 interface in syslog.

But we could found "Link become ready" after 19 days on untouched those environment.

Environment:

Hardware: NEC EXPRESS 110Rh-1

OS: Miracle Linux ver4 (Kernel 2.6.9-42.7AXsmp)

Ethernet Card: Intel PRO 57273L

e1000driver: Intel PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 7.6.12-NAPI

Hardware: EXPRESS 320Fb-LR

OS: Miracle Linux ver4 (Kernel 2.6.9-42.18AXsmp)

Ethernet Card: Intel PRO 57273L

e1000driver: Intel PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 7.2.9-NAPI