Topic: HELP! HELP!

[Serge Dutremble]

I have just converted from Cable modem to DSL a week ago.

I had bandwidth problem with the cable connection and found out DSL is twice as fast (for me anyway).

HOWEVER, my IP is changing regularly (nothing bad here) and on at least two occasions, the pppoe driver could not re-negotiate the connection.

The first time it happened, my SME server had crashed bad (kernel panic).  A hard reboot was necessary and I had to run FSCK on all my partitions to get it back online!

It continued to work for another 4 days without problem and then, again, the pppoe could not get the connection up again.  This time, I had to cycle the power on my DSL modem as nothing I could do from SME would fix it.  The , it worked again for another few days.

My last problem was this morning.  I cycle the power on the DSL modem and that seemed to cause SME to have another kernel panic!  Hard reboot, fsck, and my DSL seemed to work fine again.

EXCEPT that now, my SME gateway is invisible from the internet!  I had enabled SSH and had a web setup.  All is now dead from the internet point of view!  I went to DSLReports and did a port scan with the result that now all my ports are a "black hole".  I can ping the IP and my DDNS updates properly so the ping to the dns also works.  However, ssh or http request just die and do nothing after a few minutes of trying.

What kind of setup could make SME act like this?  I suspect I have some file possibly corrupted on my system but, honestly, I do not know where to look?

I would have to have to do a complete reload!

Does anyone have any ideas?

Do not send EMail as this is broken as well.

I will monitor this forum actively.

Please Help!!!!!

Serge.

[Serge Dutremble]

MORE:

I found out that doing a ipchains status would show me all the firewall rules BUT with the wrong IP address for my internet connection!

I did a ipchains restart, with the result that all the rules were now gone completely!

As this was not too god, I did a soft reboot.

All is now back to normal!

What happened?  I probably will never know!

No more urgency guys.  If anyone as any ideas what could have happened here.  Please, do not hesitate to speak up.

Serge.

[Paul Nesbit]

Hi Serge,

Can you please send a report to bugs-TT20011126011_AT_e-smith.com, including:

  - a description of the problem, noting dates/times
  - version of s/w (Are you using SME Server V5, or a development release?)
  - your system log (please send the log that corresponds to
    to the date/time of the problem -- see /var/log/messages.*)

(We'll post results of our findings here, as well as keep you
informed by email.)

Thanks,


Paul

[Serge Dutremble]

Sorry for lengthy delay in replying.

I will send the info I have as suggested.  I am replacing the hardware this week anyway just to rule out this aspect.  I had been running an old Pentium II MB with a Celeron 366 and 96MB SIMS RAM (the SDRAM sockets were non functional).  The new hardware will be an up-to-date MB with Duron 1Ghz and 3X128MB DDR RAM and new NICs.

Please note that the PPPoE renegotiation is still broken from time to time.

I found out that doing a CTRL-Alt-Del on the console and cycling the power on the DSL modem WHILE the reboot was occuring does not crash my server (as not much is actually running then) and the link is re-established properly after the reboot is complete.

I had to do this on 3 Dec, 17 Dec and just found out it still is broken today, 18 Dec.

Will do this again tonight.

More to follow.