eth0: Outofsync dirty pointer 470

On 14 Feb 2006 23:21:20 GMT, Kevin the Drummer staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Yeah, bad pointers in kernel space typically mean an OOPS right afterwards.

Yeah, well 2.6.7 is kind of old as well. They're up to 2.6.14! Anyway, there are a few possibilities, here in rough order of likelihood:

NIC is flaking out-- this can and does happen even though NICs have no moving parts; I've seen it. The cure for that is to replace the NIC with a good one. A new RTL8139 is pretty cheap. Then again, cheap NICs tend to flake out more often. The 3Com 905 cards I've seen have been pretty stable, and they're available for $6 + shipping from pricewatch. (Downside is they're 10-100, not GigE.)

Bad RAM-- run memtest86 for a couple of hours and make sure you get no problems reported.

Power supply flaking out-- possible if it's a cheap model or you've got every available power plug used. I think you'd see more symptoms than just the NIC if this were the case though.

Kernel bug-- unlikely, but you may want to try a newer kernel and see what happens. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL