ISC TCP/IP 1.2 hangs?

[Rich Brennan]

In article <1991Jun11.152602.22404 at ico.isc.com> dougm at ico.ISC.COM (Doug McCallum) writes:
>There are a number of known problems with TCP/IP 1.2 that are being worked
>on for the TCP/IP 1.3 release later this summer.  These include a number of
>conditions that cause TCP to get hung connections.  They aren't related to
>the WD driver (there could be other problems there but we haven't seen them).

One of my posted bugs had to do with a panic induced via PC-Interface using
my WD8003. Does PC-Interface use ISC's TCP/IP for communications? If you'd
like, I can try running serial PC-Interface to see if there's some Locus
code panic'ing the system instead of the WD8003 driver. However, note that
I don't get a panic when using TCP/IP - I mearly get a hung TCP/IP.

>One of the bugs is aggravated by using the ping command.  You can easily 
>get random hung connections by letting ping just run free.  Packets get lost
>(actually they don't ever get sent out on the net) and sometimes it interferes
>with TCP.

I don't cause the problem with ping, I was using it after the fact to get
some symptoms. I was logged in from my PC using TCP/IP, and after about
30 minutes of doing a "ls -lR" continuously over a rlogin/telnet connection,
the connection simply hung. To see if it was a TCP/IP problem or ethernet,
I did a ping on "localhost". When it answered, I stopped it, and tried to
ping the ethernet interface. There was no answer from that interface.

>I suspect that the WD driver is more robust than the 3C503 driver although both
>should be fine.  There may be some systems that have problems with older WD
>cards so hardware can't be ruled out but in those cases the problems will
>usually appear as the network not working at all and will be hardware related
>not software.

I've had a few emails saying that switching from WD8003 to a 3C503 fixed
the problem. One even said going from WD8003 to the WD8013 fixed it.

As far as old hardware, unless my distributor is shipping old stuff, my
controller was purchased about 6 months ago. I am running a 8 MHz bus, so
I shouldn't be beating on the card any worse than an newer '286 AT. The only
difference is that my instructions execute a tad faster, so I could be doing
back-to-back board accesses faster.

By the way, thanks for posting here to keep us up-to-date on tracking this
bug.



Rich
-- 
brennan at merk.com	...!uunet!merk!brennan		Rich Brennan