[mythtv-users] Why does my dvr randomly drop from the network?

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 24 September 2011 14:23, Rick <rbonafied at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I admit I'm in a bit of a panic and I'm fearful that the answer will be
> a bad motherboard.  I'm keeping an open mind!
>
> The problem is my DVR randomly drops from the network within the hour
> after a reboot.  The link beat it still there, it just stops
> communicating.  If I unplug the cable and plug it back in, it comes back
> to life.  If I rmmod r8169 and modprobe r8169 it comes back to life.
> If, however, I shut down eth0 and bring it back up, it doesn't come back
> to life.  I even reset the bios to defaults and started again.
>
> I figured it was something with the OS, so I just reloaded the OS from
> scratch and it happened again.  I'm freakin!
>
> Particulars:
>        Distro: Mageia 1 (previously Mandriva 2010.2)
>        Kernel now: 2.6.38.8-desktop-5.mga (was 2.6.33.*)
>        kernel module: r8169
>        Video card: MSI GT218 (newly added after old one bailed)
>                Card runs latest Nvidia drivers 275.28
>        Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H
>
> Any help is *greatly* appreciated!  Even if it's tell me to use a
> different forum!
>

I don't know if you are getting the same problem I got once.
Some network cards have a hardware fault in that they cannot handle
their fifo getting full.
So, if the PC is a little slow at reading the data from the network
card, the network card can hang.
I managed to fix this on my network card by improving the card reset
feature in such a way that the card did not retry to link negotiation,
and instead just stopped the fifo, cleaned it out, and started it
again. This lost a few packets but the card was never in link state
down.
I cannot remember which network card it did the fix for.
Maybe your network card has a similar fault.
The main symptom on mine was I could watch a video stream, but as soon
as I brought up the program guide on the OSD, it just hung the system
and never displayed the program guide.

Kind Regards

James