uh..oh.. I think I blew up my network..

[George Harrison]

Hello, last night was crazy for my bandwith. I had two torrents downloading (legal torrents, Slackware 10.2 actually), YaST running an update (from an FTP server), downloading patches for a game, and doing some other stuff. Suddenly the network just quit. The whole box just slowed down for a sec, all torrents went down to 0 B/S, and when I tried to ping google it just sat there. I was stumped. I went out into the other room and saw that the third light for my 2Wire router was out. Great, it kicked me off the network because I overloaded it. No big deal I thought, a simple reboot and I'll be in my suse system again with my network up. I rebooted and nothing happened, still no network, this puzzled me.. so then I ran dmesg to see if this was a hardware problem. What I found was a bit disturbing:

eth0: link up
eth0: link down

now picture about 50 of those, up and down. This was around midnight and I didn't feel like doing anything except sleeping, so I did that. When I got up I saw that my dad was on Firefox, so apparently it didn't effect his box as his network is still up (three pc's in the house are linked together with ethernet cables). My mom's computer still has a network up otherwise I wouldn't be able to type this. Now here's the kicker.. my mom and dad run Windows 2000 SP4

Operating system error? Did I blow up my network by overloading it making it a hardware issue? Did my ISP get pissed and boot me out? I'm confused here..

EDIT: oh, and I'm almost ruling out a hardware issue as when I plug in my eth cable there are two blinking lights that come from my mobo, indicating a network connection has been made.

[Dapper Dan]

Hmmm. Interesting... Have you tried running a live distro to see if it will configure a connection on the box in question? I seem to remember you have many...

[George Harrison]

Hmmm. Interesting... Have you tried running a live distro to see if it will configure a connection on the box in question? I seem to remember you have many...

Yep, SLAX Popcorn Edition is coming up with nothing, yet it was working just fine two days ago.

[Dapper Dan]

Hmmm. Interesting... Have you tried running a live distro to see if it will configure a connection on the box in question? I seem to remember you have many...

Yep, SLAX Popcorn Edition is coming up with nothing, yet it was working just fine two days ago.

If nothing will utilize it then it does indeed sound like some sort of hardware failure. Sorry I couldn't help more...
EDIT: Maybe open the box, pull it out, then snap it back in, maybe in another location if that is possible. That's all I can think of.

[George Harrison]

An update..

I messed with the router and put my eth cord end into another slot on the switch and now there's a solid orange light coming from the network LED thing on the board, before it was a blinking orange and green light, almost a stand by if you will. I was quite excited to see the solid light yet, still nothing. SuSE, Ubuntu, Slax, and Mepis have all failed. I have tried unplugging cords, resetting switches and routers, and everything. All the while my dad is laughing and taunting me and going on how if my box were running Win2K I wouldn't have these problems...... every five minutes! When you've got a family of die hard NT users it is enough to make you start heavy drug use and/or drinking.

Well, at least I have the solid orange light and thus the "eth0: link up, eth0: link down" thing in dmesg has disappeared which is excellent but still nothing when it comes down to a ping I have a 3Com Network card I could throw in, I'd just take out my sound card or something. I'll figure this out soon enough.

[onlinebacon]

Oooh ooh ooh, just to scare your dad, when you get ur network back up say " If you were running Suse/BSD I wouldn't be in your computer right now "
Try the card, should help, but if not, sorry dude.

[George Harrison]

ack, this is driving me crazy. The funny thing is that ifconfig comes back and sees both the lo and eth0 interfaces but the output of route comes back with it saying that it is only using lo! This cannot be a software issue at this point, as the live cd's don't lie (I was just using SLAX yesterday and I was surfing newegg). I'll try out this new NIC and see what's up, thanks for the help so far.

[onlinebacon]

Is it both of the boxes that it isnt working with or just the one?

[jaboua]

Have you tried using some other ethernet cable? My ethernet cable kept me offline for 3 weeks or something some months ago... (but I guess that's because my mom closed the door which the ethernet cable went through...) However, it's worth a shot.

Also, have you tried shutting completly off and starting again, instead of just rebooting? That have somlvet some problems here too before...

[George Harrison]

Is it both of the boxes that it isnt working with or just the one?

SuSE and Ubuntu fail to ping, as does all of the mini cd's. The other two boxes are working just fine in the house (both of my parents boxes). So it's narrowed down to just my box

Have you tried using some other ethernet cable? My ethernet cable kept me offline for 3 weeks or something some months ago... (but I guess that's because my mom closed the door which the ethernet cable went through...) However, it's worth a shot.

Also, have you tried shutting completly off and starting again, instead of just rebooting? That have somlvet some problems here too before...

I have tried shutting it completely down and then powering back on but still nothing. The cable could be bad, so that's a thought. I simply need to play this like a game of chess, move one piece at a time. I have already made some "moves" and I now know that it cannot be the software, I know that the router and switch are working fine otherwise my parents wouldn't be able to ping, etc.

Well, I'm off to install that new NIC and see what's going on from there. It's not terribly expensive to go to wireless but it might be a hassle and I think that's what my parents don't want. Other than that I'd be glad to pay for a wireless access card/point and a new wireless router/modem.