ethernet collisions

[Bob Nielsen <nielsen@primenet.com>]

I have a system running potato which suddenly started experiencing a large
number of collisions on its ethernet port.  It seems to work fine for a
while and suddenly I get collisions and everything grinds to a halt.  This
just started and I was wondering if anything had changed in potato which
would cause this, or if I might have developed a hardware problem. 

It happens with either 2.0.36 or 2.2.1 kernels:


eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 48:54:E8:25:C2:85
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:735 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:24
          TX packets:661 errors:164 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:165
          collisions:2796 txqueuelen:100
          Interrupt:11 Base address:0x6100

Ifconfig on the other end of the ethernet link (running hamm) shows a much
lower number of collisions (with many more RX frame errors):

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:80:AD:B0:BA:DC
          inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:797 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:2424
          TX packets:830 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Collisions:16
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x300
  
Any ideas?

Bob

----
Bob Nielsen                 Internet: nielsen@primenet.com
Tucson, AZ                  AMPRnet:  w6swe@w6swe.ampr.org
DM42nh                      http://www.primenet.com/~nielsen