On 16.05.2008, at 03:58, Luke Fahey wrote:

> I have Read something interesting, and that is another user with an  
> alix board  has had an issue with once the Ethernet connection on  
> the lan interface is disconnected and reconnected no traffic will go  
> through it. Perhaps this is the issue I am having. ( I haven’t  
> tested this yet).

Funny you should mention this - I recall seeing the same behavior once  
or twice a while ago when I was testing a m0n0wall 1.3b image on an  
ALIX.2. However, I couldn't reliably reproduce it, so I just put it  
down to some weird glitch... But now it sounds more like there's an  
actual bug either in the Ethernet controllers on the ALIX board (which  
other OSes drivers may perhaps work around), or in the FreeBSD vr(4)  
driver.

Also, there are two FreeBSD PRs about this, but unfortunately without  
a fix so far:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/100499
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/103495

There have been some very extensive changes to the vr driver lately  
(in CVS), which may well fix this issue (among others); however,  
unfortunately those changes are currently for FreeBSD 7.x only (and  
are not in 7.0-RELEASE either).

- Manuel