ie0 bark reset??

[Dave Danielson]

[[Well, this one is strange. There was a lot of talk about it in the v6
issues, but it never really was resolved and it looks like it just went
away (a Sun bug fix?). In any event, I included the most informative of
the articles from v6n16 at the end of this article. -bdg]]

I am relatively inexperienced in Sun systems so bear with me if this is a
simple question.  All I know is I'm having a lot of problems with it.

We seem to be having some random network problem (runts, bad crc, etc.)
and from time to time I will get "tbds out of sync" on the Sun console.
This message is usually followed soon by "ie0 bark reset" at which point
my system automatically re-boots.  I'm certainly trying to get to the
bottom of the network problems but I don't believe they should have such a
dramatic effect on my system.  First, could someone tell me what these
messages mean? and second, is there any way to avoid this automatic
re-boot?  We're running some very long jobs over night and this 3am
re-boot is giving me fits!

Thanks for the help...
Dave (daved at tsdiag.ccur.com)

(BTW-we are using CISCO router/bridges but I don't think this is
related to my problems)

[[Included Text from v6n16 -bdg]]

X-Date:    Thu, 4 Feb 88 02:00:04 EST
X-From:    Chris Torek <chris at mimsy.umd.edu>
X-Subject: Re: "iebark" errors on Sun 3

Iebark is one half of the Intel Ethernet watchdog timer (the other half is
called iedog; the Intel Ethernet chip has so many bugs it takes two
routines, and many pages of code, to avoid them all).  The hang appears to
be the result of a bug in the driver.  We saw a spate of these some time
ago; they subsequently vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared (or
did someone replace a board?  I forget).  I stared at the driver for
several hours while these were occurring, and twice thought I had found
the problem, but was wrong both times.  It may be another hardware bug.