3c905B boot delay

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Robert Sim wrote:

> At boot time, there is about a 2min delay before any traffic can be
> handled.  The card appears to be functioning just fine- the link light is
> on at 100MB, and is connected at the other end to a cisco switch.  There
> is simply no response to network requests (the result being that my nfs
> mounts and ypbind requests take some time to get started, or simply
> timeout).

I have exactly the same behaviour here with some 3C905 (B and C), SMC and
tulip cards. The only common point is the Cisco switch (5500 series with
WS-X5225R cards). As the same computers booted properly with an older
switch, I concluded that the switch is the problem.
Using tcpdump, I was able to see packets coming in (i.e. broadcast) and
also arp requests for the gateway address going out, but no arp reply
being received from the switch (so the link is not dead). About 1 minute
after ifconfig is run (by the start-up scripts), an arp reply is
received and everything works as expected afterwards. I'm not in charge
for this switch and I don't have any docs about it, so I don't know if
this 1 minute wait is related to some internal parameter.
As the computers are not rebooted often, I included a "sleep 60" after
network interface initialization.

> Conversely, a few of my machines are dual-boot with windows, and in
> windows I have experienced no such problem.  

Same with me, but how fast are you accessing the network after booting
Windows? My experience is that Windows booting process takes quite a bit
of time, then you need to log-on... then the 1 minute is already gone and
you can access the network.

Sincerely,

Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De

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