Recently I started to have problems with ipx.
The situation: this is a small network with a few linux boxes and Novell
server as gateway to the outside world. Recently I upgraded some of those
computers to development kernels, and one computer with windows NT appeared
on the network. The linux computers have all enabled ipx.
When the NT is turned on, it sends an ipx broadcast packet to the network
from time to time.
tcpdump shows
22:19:10.486375 183.00:60:08:a0:0d:85.455 > 186.ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff.455: ipx-netbios 50
where 00:60:08:a0:0d:85 is the address of the NT box.
Sometimes the network got hogged and tcpdump showed the same netbios
packets, seemingly originating from the NT, flooding the network at enormous
rate. After unplugging the poor computer with NT from the net, those packets
continued to flood the network.
After some playing with tcpdump, it became clear that those packets are
coming from linux computers.
So it looks like the 2.2 kernels are sometimes duplicating the received
broadcast packets. Just now there are 3 linuxes with 2.2pre6 kernels, 2
linuxes with 2.0.* kernels and novell netware server.
Everything works fine, until I turn on the NT computer. The linuxes
start to duplicate netbios broadcast packets, then (as it seems) duplicating
each others' duplicated packets and bring the whole network to its knees.
If there are only 2 linux boxes with 2.2 kernels, the duplication rate seems
to be lower than the production of those packets from NT, and everything
works.
I have the same problems with 2.2pre6 and 2.1.125 kernels. When I disable
ipx in the kernel, there are no problems. Also when I reboot those linuxes
with 2.0.36 kernels, everything works fine even with ipx enabled.
cat /proc/net/ipx_interface gives:
Network Node_Address Primary Device Frame_Type
00000186 0000C0948CD4 Yes eth0 EtherII
00000183 0000C0948CD4 No eth0 802.3
and /proc/net/ipx_route:
Network Router_Net Router_Node
00000183 Directly Connected
00000180 00000186 0020AFBF0193
00000186 Directly Connected
Two 2.2 linux computers have 3c509b cards, one smc-ultra network card, and the NT have
also 3c509 network card.
There was a mail from Gilbert Ramirez, dated Thu, 31 Dec 1998 11:56:40 , with subject:
2.2.0-pre1/Token-Ring/IPX = bad
describing something which seemed similar to my problem.
regards,
-- ---------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabik http://www.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik@center.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------
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