Transient network problems on bootup
I am having strange problems during the boot of my SPARCStation 4,
here is the relevant portion of dmesg:
sunlance.c:v1.12 11/Mar/99 Miguel de Icaza (miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx)
eth0: LANCE 08:00:20:7d:7f:ff
eth0: using auto-carrier-detection.
eth0: Carrier Lost, trying TPE
Sending BOOTP and RARP requests............. timed out!
After that the boot proceeds as normal and once I log in, I find the
network in perfect working order: I can ping, telnet, mount NFS, etc.,
etc. The network is standard twisted pair with RJ-45 connectors and
the Sparc is plugged into a Linksys hub. It isn't surprising that the
BOOTP and RARP requests time out, since no one on my net is providing
these services, but where does the carrier problem come from? Besides,
I think that the carrier is checked by the boot PROM and it evidently
passed this check...
This problem appeared recently -- it *may* have been caused by the
upgrade from slink to potato, or by kernel upgrade to 2.2.13 -- I am
not sure.
As to the modutils situation, it's getting slightly ridiculous. The
binary package modutils is missing the executables. I cannot compile
the source myself because gcc 2.95.2 barf on insmod.c (I submitted
this as a bug to Debian). And when I tried to install gcc272, it
wouldn't install! Viz:
Sequence (?-...) not recognized at /usr/bin/dpkg-preconfig line 99.
E: Sub-process dpkg-preconfig --apt returned an error code (255)
E: Failure running script dpkg-preconfig --apt
My next step would probably be uninstall my gcc, reinstall it from
stable, and then try again. Oh, well.
--
Akor
akor@eternal.net
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