[Sunhelp] Odd problem with Sun FastEthernet card

[Mark C. Langston]

Hi everyone.  I've got an odd problem:

I've got a Sparc 5 with a X1056 Sun Fast Ethernet SBus card (be interface),
running Solaris 2.6.  That's not the odd bit.  Wait for it. :)

Anyway, I know this card isn't supported under 2.6, and you have to
grab the 2.3 patch to get the be_speed util to change the speed on the card.
For about 1.5 years, I've never had a problem with it.

Until, that is, the past few weeks.  Up until a few weeks ago, this thing
was in a Cycle 5.  I finally got around to copying the root disk over to
the Sparc 5, moving the cards over, and getting everything back up and
running.

The only oddness I had, besides some serious difficulty getting the 
system to boot at all without doing some wacky debugging in /dev and
/devices, was that instead of having le0 and be0, I how have le1 and
be2.  I could also never get the be interface to connect at 100Mbps
until the changeover, even though it's been connected to a 10/100
autosensing switch.

Now, every so often, the be interface will seem to lock up -- no 
traffic in or out.  Established sessions will die.  A quick ping
to the inside and outside interface IPs will usually get things going
again, although occasionally I have to log in and restart NAT
(I'm using Darren Reed's excellent ip_filter package for both
firewalling and NAT.  Again, the only thing that's changed here
in 1.5 years has been the motherboard and the physical hard drive
the data's been stored on).

It is always the be interface; there's never any lockup, freeze, or
hesitation with the le interface.

So, I'm at a loss;  there are no errors being logged at all, and the
behavior's indicative of a software problem, though the only thing
that's changed has been the hardware.

I'm planning on upgrading to the newest version of ip_filter this
weekend, so maybe that'll fix the problem, though I never thought it
was that hardware dependent.

Has anyone ever seen anything similar to this?  Does anyone know
if there's a plain second 10^T Ethernet SBus card for a Sparc 5?
(I don't want a qfe, and the 501-1881 isn't for the 5.)

-- 
Mark C. Langston
mark at bitshift.org
Systems & Network Admin
San Jose, CA