Ethernet card not responding after some time

["Dijkman, R.M. (Remco)" <R.M.Dijkman@ewi.utwente.nl>]

Hi,

I have got this really weird problem. I have a router set up at home and
everything works fine. Computers at home can always access the internet.

I also have the SSH port on the router open so that I can connect to it
from elsewhere. However, when nobody is using the internet at home, the
router stops responding and I can not connect to it via SSH anymore. The
weird thing is that while somebody is using the internet at home, I can
SSH no problem.

First I thought that it was the firewall, so I completely opened it up
(iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT). However, that did not work. I did find out
that the router stopped responding on all ports: no pings, FTP, CVS,
nothing. Then I thought it might be the power management, so I turned of
ACPI (kernel option acpi=off in lilo.conf), but that did not work
either.

Has anybody experienced a similar problem or have any idea what the
problem could be?

Regards,

Remco Dijkman