Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
For some reason dhclient WAS running, but I don't know why. Especially on that interface as it was not chosen as the default interface during install, and that's the only interface I've had configured to use dhcp at any time. As I said, both interfaces specify "static" in /etc/network/interfaces. It's working now as it's had long enough to repeat its behavior based on the time frame of how long things took to happen last time so I'm assuming it's fixed. And, if dhclient was getting a new IP address for that interface, why not for the other NIC too? What makes the Marvell interface the interface that keeps getting reconfigured and the 3Com interface stay stable? I've never seen this kind of thing happen before and I've switched interfaces between static and dhcp many times. I've never had to manually kill dhclient before to keep it from reconfiguring a working, manually configured, interface. To me that says there is possibly something wrong with the driver for the NIC itself and it's crashing and losing its state or something. Nothing shows up in syslog or kern.log, but I still wonder about it. And, no, network-mangler isn't running or installed. It's one of the first things I get rid of in a desktop install. IIRC, n-m only comes with a gui, and I have no gui installed. Plus, it doesn't show up using dpkg -l | grep network so I know it's not there This is just a base install with the server packages I need to run for use in my lab. Nothing else. You wouldn't happen to have any guesses on the second problem I listed would you? :)On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 01:36:43PM -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:Andrew Sackville-West wrote:I wondered about it, but it didn't make sense in that the networking system is completely ignoring its own configuration. Plus, this behavior has survived several reboots of the system. However, I will give that a try and see if the behavior changes.On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:14:25AM -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:Hi All,I'm having a strange problem with a Marvell 88E8056 - 10/100/1000 Controller on a Biostar TA 770 A2+ motherboard. This is an Etch AMD64 install, but I have added the 2.6.25-amd64 kernel as I could not get the Marvell controller to work at all with the 2.6.18 kernel....I have two NICs. The onboard Marvell and a 3Com 3c905b. The 3Com handles dhcp and dns requests. Both are configured for statically configured IP addresses in /etc/network/interfaces. However, the Marvell will, after some unknown amount of time--less than 12 hours--drop its static IP address and request a dhcp address from the 3Com adapter....I'm assuming this is a bug in the sky2 module, but don't know enough about things in this area to do more than assume.I bet it's not a driver problem but simply that you have inadvertently started a dhclient. It picks up a lease from somewhere, but then you restart networking which reverts the interface to a static address. Then when the dhclient thinks the lease has expired, it goesand gets another one.I've seen this happen on my laptop when I've been monkeying around with getting a connection at a new location. I'll forget that I manually started dhclient and then some time later... maybe days, I'll connect somewhere where I get static ip (like home) and then all of the sudden the dhclient will wake up and go looking for a newaddress... probably a killall dhclient will sort it out.do you have network-mangler^Wmanager installed?perhaps some other package is starting dhclient? Basically, if you have both interfaces using static ip, dhclient shouldn't even bestarted. care to post /etc/network/interfaces?A