For people with the really old Celeron boards, update your bios's or check
the PnP settings. I'm guessing that FreeBSD 5.3 is assigning NIC irq's
differently and your bios is partly to blame. If PnP is on, turn it off and
manually assign irq's by slot. Most likely, the PnP/ACPI components have
been heavily rewritten and act completely differently. Also, it's possible
that 5.3 is attempting to use the early ACPI implementations on your boards,
turn it off! ACPI/PNP on old boards is almost always broken in someway or
another. Linux fixes this by putting a date limiter on how old of a bios
it'll accept for PnP/ACPI functions. I'm not sure FreeBSD does the same.

I've been pounding 1.2b6 on a 1U opteron 2.4 with 512 mb of ram with dual
gigabit marvel nics integrated. No lockups so far, but each nic pops up on a
separate irq according to the bios. Also, ditch any realtek cards you have
at your earliest convenience, they are bad on any platform. The performance
on them stinks because it offloads all tcp operations on the CPU, and does
as little work as possible in the IC. But this also means they are terribly
susceptible to driver oopsies.

I've been running full gigabit speed traffic routing through m0n0wall
without a hitch for 2 days now.

Michael Joy
HEP - University of Mississippi
mdjoy at phy dot olemiss dot edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Guardiani [mailto:jesse at wingnet dot net] 
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 5:23 PM
To: m0n0wall at lists dot m0n0 dot ch
Subject: Re: 1.2b6 lock-ups ....

Christian Rohmann wrote:

> Hey every1,
> 
> I just used b6 for about 12 hrs and in between 10 of them m0n0 froze
> twice. Does any1 here have similar troubles?
> 
> 
> Here are the hardware specs:
> 
> 
> Abit BE6 (I think) mobo

I've got one of those. Fairly old mobo. Is your BIOS up-to-date?


> Intel Celeron 300A (not overclocked)
> 128Megs of RAM

In how many sticks? If it's in 2 sticks, have you tried it with
just 1? RAM can sometimes pass a boot test but still cause problems.


> Matrox Mystique
> 
> 3Com 3c905b
> Realtek sth ... (I do have a few 3com cards still here ... with linux
> realtek is sometimes not really working good)

I use 3c905, sis,  and intel NICs exclusively. No experience with
realteks. Possibly swap them out and see if the problem goes away?

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
http://www.wingnet.net