Hi gang, I've been having this weird problem with my system, and having wracked my brains for a while, I still haven't come up with any good explanations. My machine at home is connected to the Internet through an ethernet connection to the college network. I'm running pretty vanilla potato with a 2.2.17 kernel. Every now and then, at random times, I have these weird network outages. I wont be able to connect to any web pages, fetchmail wont check my mail, I can't send mail, pretty much everything doesn't work. I can, however, ping nearby hosts (which I can't get a tcp connection to). And if I have an open connection (such as ssh to my work machine), it continues to work, even whilst everything else doesn't. I can connect from my work machine (also running 2.2.17 on potato) to all the things that I can't connect to from my home machine at these times. It's not that my NIC is having a bad packet day, as it's still up and working with the connections that are already open. It's probably not a firewall rule, as they are all set to log, and work the rest of the time. Yet during these outages, everything will just time-out. It's also not the college network, as I can go a few rooms down and connect fine to any site from another machine (running windoze nt). One thought that I have had is that maybe our firewall (a FreeBSD box, I believe), is throtleing my connections to prevent me hogging too much bandwidth, but that doesn't seem especially likely, does it? Another that just occured to me as I'm writing this is that my kernel is patched with the Stealth kernel-patch (the one that was on freshmeat recently, sorry, can't tell you where at the moment due to another outage that inspired me to write this!). I can't remember if the problem started before I used this kernel or not. Unfortanely, I don't have the luxury of rebooting at the moment to test it. Does anyone have any suggestions? It's really got me stumped! cheers, damon (who realises that he's still contributing to the list-bloat!) -- Damon Muller | Did a large procession wave their torches Criminologist/Linux Geek | As my head fell in the basket, http://killfilter.com | And was everybody dancing on the casket... PGP (GnuPG): A136E829 | - TBMG, "Dead"
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