[vortex-bug] Problem with 3Com 3C905B 100bTX: (transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e000)

[Livio Baldini Soares]

Hi all.

  I'm a system adminitrador (and undergrad student) here in my
University (University of São Paulo - Brazil) and one of our servers
is having some network problems. We have about 60 clients on a network
all hooked up to one gateway, which is the only box that has internet
connection. This server is the network's proxy (using squid), DNS, and
http server.  Everytime the network gets real busy (like more than
have of the clients are being used) it kind of hangs a little
(connection gets really slow) and then returns to "normal". Since this
is happening very frequently, it's kind of a pain in the ass. When
that happens I get this in my kern.log:

eth0: Tx Ring full, refusing to send buffer.
eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e000.
  Flags; bus-master 1, full 1; dirty 41474248 current 41474264.
  Transmit list 00000000 vs. cba5ba80. 
  0: @cba5ba00  length 80000036 status 00000036
  1: @cba5ba10  length 80000036 status 00000036
  2: @cba5ba20  length 800005ea status 000005ea
<etc.>
  15: @cba5baf0  length 80000036 status 00000036
eth0: Resetting the Tx ring pointer.

  I'm using Debian 2.2, with kernel 2.2.17 with 3c95x driver V.0.99H.

To try to solve the problem I switched the the card with another of
the exact same model (3C905B 100bTX), and the same thing happened, so
I think the card is (fisically) fine.

  Does anybody have an ideia on how to fix this?

  Thanks for your time in reading my message, and thanks in advance if
anyone has any type of solution, or any place I can look for more info
or feedback.

--
  Livio <livio@linux.ime.usp.br>