Sudden disconnections without a notice!

[ibesso]

Hi.

I had really excellent solutions last time I had a serious problems and now it is on my new computer.
I have Gigabyte GA-K8NS-Ultra-939 motherboard with an AMD64 3000+ CPU, 1GB Kingston RAM, SATA HDD - Western Digital - 250GB and 3 CD-drives (Plextor 401240A - CD-recorder, Pioneer A05 - DVR, Liteon - DVD-ROM).
I'm using an AGP video card: Radeon XT256.
The Gigabyte motherboard include nforce3 chipset and audio onboard controller (AC97) and 2 onboard NICs: one is nvidia which I am not using (I disabled it from the BIOS and re-enabled it lately but still not using it) and the second NIC is "Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller".
I'm using an Alcatel ST-510 router and I have 4 computers connected to the LAN.
Important note: I have NEVER got this kind of a problem before on ANY of these computers or any computer I have used before myself.

I have installed and currently using Windows XP x64 (64-bit) edition and installed all drivers.
Every day I have at between 2-3 disconnections from the internet. I can still ping my IP, but cannot ping the router. When I use arp -a I see only one record of the router's IP address matching an illegal MAC address (all zeros: 00-00-00...).
I have tried all different versions of the network drivers including Microsoft's old drivers, MS windows update drivers and Marvell's several drivers and yet I get these kind of disconnections. I have tried to change some settings in the network card properties, but still did not solve it.
When I get this problem, I only need to disable and re-enable it and then I get my connection to the "world" back.
I have tried to alter the settings of the TCP/IP limitation of 10 concurrent half-open connections to 50 or 100 and still got this problem.
I do not see any error on the event viewer and do not receive any popup/warning/notification about the disconnection.
I already browsed other forums suggesting that the IEEE 1394 might interfere if it has the same IRQ as the NIC, but this is not the case here: NIC - 19 and the IEEE1394 - 18 (click here to see the thread).

The rest of the computers remain connected and don't have any problems.

This is very disturbing.
If there is any help I can get from you, I'll be very pleased to try anything that might solve this problem. I really suspect that onboard network cards do have problems (correct me if I'm wrong).

Thank you all in advance.

 

[netmanrick]

Have you investigated using the Nvidia nforce3 drivers for mobo ?

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations

 

[ibesso]

Do you mean to try using the other ethernet controller ?

BTW: I noticed that the green-yello led on the computer's side near the nic is not on when this happens, but the orange one (transmitting/receiving) is blinking as usual. It's like it's trying to send/receive and it's blocked...

 

[technome]

Lost packets, or filtered packets..ping will go through routers which are dropping other packets.
Use the pathping command, to an external site. Pathping your ISPs DNS servers for instance, you should have few if any packets lost.

Check your MTU settings for your router with "TCP Optimizer"
make sure your router is connected to a battery backup unit.

Bad cable, different NICs will react to a cable differently.

Any power save setting enabled

Can you place an Intel NIC in the machine for testing, disabling the others for testing.




........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[ibesso]

Hi and thank you for your response.
Finally, as I suspected the beta driver was the problem. On the other onboard NIC (Nvidia), I have no communications problems.
I wonder why they release these beta drivers and not respond to emails (Gigabyte and Marvell).
Anyway, I am glad I didn't go directly to buying a new PCI NIC.
Remember to always check your drivers.

 

[mikee805]

I am having the same problem with my Marvel Yukon LON. I thought it was a driver issue becuase of its sudden on set. I have had it working perfectly for months. But now it disconnects itself after a few minutes connected. So I reinstalled the original drivers I had but the problem persisted. I thought it might be a heat problem but that does not quite make sense, since everything else works and it was working.
Are the beta drivers you were using are they from Microsoft, Marvell, Nvidia,or Gigabyte? And could you provide a link to the drivers you have that are working.

Thanks.