[tulip] lost link - lost forever? (FA310TX)

[Lev A. Melnikovsky]

Hello!

I'm new here, so please excuse me if my question is obvious, well 
discussed or whatever. Please, just direct me to the FAQ (if any?).

The problem is that I have 2 computers (Celeron and my good-n-old 
486) connected without a hub. They do work together (I should say it 
was not as easy to make tulip work with the 486 one, but this is 
another story) and provide some 1.5 MB/s rate with ftp. 
Unfortunately, if the link was lost for a short while the driver 
assumes it was lost forever. This is pretty annoying, since when I 
reboot one machine, I have to restart tulip on the second one, for my 
[very] local area network to operate. So I wonder if demented is the 
tulip or me? Or, perhaps, the hardware? How can I fix it?

I've got 2.4.2 kernel, 2 NETGEAR FA310TX cards and a twisted pair 4 
meters long. I also have some programming experience, but I'm 
absolutely ignorant about Linux kernel-mode and Ethernet. So, when I 
tried to look through the code I realized that I have no idea what to 
do. Could somebody, please, help me?

advTHANKSance
--
                                           Leva.