probem with ethernet on potata/mac beige G3

[Andrew Watson <awatson@bigfoot.com>]

Bit of a newbie question.

I am running a vanilla install of potato on a mac beige g3/233 with
exim/apache/python/netatalk and no X. It works well, except that every so
often ( sometimes twice in a day, sometimes not for a month ) something goes
wrong with the ethernet.

1. The machine becomes unpingable
2. 'route' freezes after printing the loopback line
3. nothing about it appears in the syslog ( except for the afpd file server
connections timing out )
4. you can fix it by simply going ifcongig eth0 down / ifconfig eth0 up and
re-entering the default route.

Can anybody suggest what might be happening? Is this a known
hardware/software problem? Can someone point me in the direction of a
diagnosing-ethernet-problems-HOWTO ( or the right list to post this question
to? )

Any advice appreciated.

Andrew Watson
Formsteel