regularly dying network connection

[hawk <hawk@fac13.ds.psu.edu>]

My network goes down quite regularly, especially under load.  I've
written a script to force-reload after waiting five seconds, whcih leaves it functional most of the time (although some requests hit when the network is down and casue errors--meaning that sometimes it doesn't even stay up five seconds).  It's also necessary, about once a day, to power off the machine to reset something on hte network card, as even force-reload won't recover.

The card is a eepro, and when the connection dies, the tcpdump report is:

fac13:/home/hawk# tcpdump 
tcpdump: listening on eth0
15:00:33.547471 146.186.61.60.1033 > 231.182.220.243.36546: udp 4 [ttl 1]
tcpdump: pcap_loop: read: Network is down

hawk