lan card failure

[james gould]

System running HPUX 10.20
Error with Lan card

In syslog.log file found following error:

btlan0 failed

Ten seconds later received
btlan0 recovered
Is this a driver failure or card failure?

[John Poff]

Hi,

Probably neither. I usually see this when there is a cable problem or a problem at the switch. You'll see those error messages when you lose connection for a bit and then it comes back.

JP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

In almost everycase, this is a cable problem, possibly a hub lost power briefly, or a switch port was reset.

Failures like this are expected/anticiptaed in the TCP/IP protocol world and normally recovery is automatic. If these are rare events, it's safe to ignore them.

One very common source of this kind of problem is cable length - you might be near (or above) the 100m mark.

[Ron Kinner]

It is probably a cable fault (don't forget the connector on the NIC - I've seen them get flaky too) but it wouldn't hurt to go into lanadmin (lanadmin, lan, display) and check for errors (mostly on the second page of the display). Move a big file to another machine and then back again and recheck to see if the errors are climbing rapidly. (You may also notice a major difference in the time it takes the file to go one way vs the other. This is definitely a duplex mismatch issue if you notice a big time difference.) Could be that you have a duplex mismatch and the switch is resetting the port because the error rate is too high. While in lanadmin check to see if the duplex is set to full, half or auto. Then have your network guy check the switch. Best is for both to be at 100 FULL if both ends support it. Auto/Auto sometimes works but must people don't trust it. FULL/Auto or Auto/FULL will definitely give you a mismatch since Auto will only negotiate if the other end is also set to Auto. If not it goes on strike and set the link to Half.

Ron

[Ajit Natarajan]

Please check the NetTL log to see what the failure pertained to. Networking related subsystems (drivers, transport, etc.) log to the NetTL log.

Here's how you do it:

1. cd /var/adm
2. Look for the files whose names start with nettl.LOG.
3. Pick the most recent one.
4. Run netfmt as follows:

netfmt -t 20 -f nettl.LOGxx

where nettl.LOGxx is the file you picked in step 3.

-t 20 refers to the 20 most recent records logged. You can change this number to get a varying number of log entries.

Check the netfmt(1M) man page for more information.

Let us know if you see anything unusual. If you do, please attach the relevant NetTL log entries.

Thanks.

Ajit
HP Gigabit Ethernet